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Karma wants very much to be the next Sunstone, with the kinky/geeky pornographic rom-com thing. The problem is, they aren’t geeky enough and the whole thing has too much “dude fantasy” energy to it. (He’s a photographer, she’s a bisexual supermodel with a tragic backstory. Also, the artist can’t even bring himself to draw the dude’s butt.) I mean, I realize what I’m comparing it against, but Linda Sejic’s influence matters, and Dan Wickline clearly doesn’t have a Linda.
Terminal Hero – Peter Milligan returns with something else very reminiscent of his Shade: The Changing Man run. The “terminal hero” has an inoperable brain tumor but his friend gets ahold of an illegal new therapy that gives him reality-warping superpowers but also brings all of the worst nonsense from his id out into the world. Honestly, a lot of that id-nonsense (warning: pedophilia, rape, cancer-monsters, self-harm) feels like it’s more for shock value than actually relevant to the character or the story. Anyway, he flounders around for six issues and sorta-kinda deals with some of his problems and then tries to settle into a normal life knowing he’s just one of several time bombs sitting around. Heroic, indeed.
Athena – After the fall of the Greek pantheon, Athena is reborn in the modern world (Ares too, and with Zeus looking over them as an owl—apparently he’s afraid to let his children die but also terrified they’ll kill him). Fortunately, her god-powers keep reactivating in time to deal with Greek myths recurring as modern events. Nominally this is a retelling of the Illiad, but the author’s knowledge of Greek culture and civilization is a bit weak--apparently ancient Greeks were Klingons, very much obsessed with “honorable” combat. After the four main issues this includes a short Athena/Obama crossover comic that’s just as pointless as the rest. This series didn’t have enough actual plot or effective characterization behind its idea and was mostly an excuse to have buxom Athena in revealing armor.
Adolescent Radioactive Blackbelt Hamsters – The monastery is attacked by the reincarnation of Genghis Kahn, and the Dalai Momma calls for her second-favorite students, the five mutant hamsters who are each a caricature of an action-movie star. Most of them die. It takes an issue and a half to introduce her favorite students, The Four: Jackie, Bruce, Chuck and Clint. Then much of the remainder is getting the band back together; apparently Lucy (the only female hamster) was the reason they broke up years before, but Clint doesn’t actually want to rejoin regardless. Then in the last five pages, Kahn wins and kills everyone but Clint, who leaves us on a cliffhanger of going back in time to re-join his brothers and prevent disaster. This was a cute concept, but it’s not quite funny enough—it’s not a close enough parody nor it is sufficiently witty. And the pacing is crap.
Jennifer Blood (volumes 1-2) - Garth Ennis does entertaining work here (with his usual quota of gory and sexualized violence) with a story about a normal housewife and mother who wages an extensive, meticulously-planned campaign of assassination against a mob family. It’s very tongue-in-cheek and Jennifer herself never actually sees any real threats or hardship in her campaign, but that’s okay. Volume 2 sees Al Ewing take over as the writer, and Jenn actually has to face the consequences and fallout of her actions, which is still entertaining but not the visceral thrill of extreme competence the first volume gave. This bundle actually included all 5 volumes of main series and two follow-on volumes (and a prequel starring the Ninjettes), but I didn’t bother continuing after seeing where it was headed.
Weaver (volumes 1-2) – Also apparently published as “Uncanny” and written by Andy Diggle, this is a neat action-movie adventure about a man whose superpower is the ability to temporarily copy someone’s knowledge and abilities by touching them. Turns out that this hasn’t made his life better, and he’s forcibly dragged into the complex machinations of the small number of other “active” people in the world. Two volumes, a complete story, good pacing with lots of twists and turns. (The ending is a little pat, but acceptable.) This was solid!
Raise the Dead – Oh, look, zombies. Incredibly bog-standard, by-the-books horror/splatter zombie story. Characters are introduced and killed off almost as quickly; no explanation or resolution is given for the zombies. This feels like they had ideas for zombie attacks but couldn’t get hired to write guest issues of Walking Dead so they just put them here.
Super Zombies – More zombies! Genetically-modified foods containing vaccines and human DNA caused “KHR syndrome” around the world until “the world’s smartest man” created a vaccine for it...which causes people to spontaneously develop superpowers. Then a decade later, instead of getting superpowers, people start turning into zombies—including all the existing heroes. Fortunately or not, they’re “smart zombies” who mostly keep functioning as long as they eat some people here and there, which means a nice slow-rolling apocalypse with multiple groups of supers fighting with each other. Spoiler: The “KHR virus” (the writers don’t actually understand how viruses or vaccines work) was manmade by various governments who fucked it up by not accounting for the rare “negative sequence” in human DNA, and then the hero’s cure fucked everything up further. On one hand, this is a slightly different twist on the zombie formula; but on the other hand, the backstory is all based in real-world bullshit conspiracies that I no longer have patience for.
The Complete Dracula – Bram Stoker’s original novel in illustrated form, with some beautiful artwork but no surprises. (They slightly abridged it, but not significantly.) I think perhaps the biggest problem is that by hewing so closely to the original text, the artwork…is kind of superfluous? Everything is told, so there isn’t much need to show.
Prophecy – A hilariously mashed-up “crisis crossover” of most of the characters Dynamite was publishing at the time, including Red Sonja, Vampirella, Ash Williams, Re-Animator, Athena, Sherlock Holmes, and Dracula. Sonja chases an evil sorcerer into the year 2012 where he summons evil gods to help end the world as per the Mayan calendar, and everyone else teams up to stop him. Lots of splash panels and very little plot; it’s a fanservice book.
Dejah Thoris: Gardens of Mars – Re-imagined from Burroughs' John Carter of Mars pulp stories, this is the story of a princess of the red Martians who wishes to restore the lush life the planet once had. Amy Chu is doing her best, but it’s…very true to the pulp style. Dejah herself is naïve and honestly kind of useless, but she’s running around in gold go-go boots and pasties in the Martian desert and that’s what the fans are here for. (There are a bunch of references to red Martians being “hatched”—why do they have mammaries, then? And how the hell do their hips work?), Honestly, while Burroughs had some cool ideas, I think the best of them have been re-envisioned as backstory for DC’s Martian Manhunter and this doesn’t hold my interest.
Thun’Da – Whereas this is re-imagined from the 50s comic series Thun’Da King of the Congo by Frank Frazetta and Gardner Fox. A military helicopter crashes somewhere in Africa, and the only survivor has both lost his memory (but none of his skills) and somehow been transported to a strange prehistoric world. There are dinosaurs and saber-tooth tigers and neanderthals (but oddly, only male ones) and flashbacks to his previous life as a horrible monster of a man. He finds a citadel full of modern (primitive) humans and learns their language just in time for an attack by talking apes; and by saving the day (with the help of a magic gong and a giant snake) he gets named as the legendary savior “Thun’da.” An entertaining bit about this collection is that it reprints some of the original stories, which makes it easy to see which parts they used and which they rearranged or ignored (and how little “continuity” mattered in the old days!)
Jungle Girl Omnibus – Jungle Girl is “what if Tarzan but with cheesecake?” and this is a collection by Frank Cho, a man who understands cheesecake. A modern-day plane with a TV crew onboard crashes and is rescued by Jana the Jungle Girl, who shepherds them through a jungle full of prehistoric dangers. (It doesn’t go well for them, but most of them are opium smugglers anyway so it’s not terrible when disasters while fleeing the dirt-people kill them.) Then they chase a downed space shuttle to a mysterious God-Mountain and find a beached submarine that the captain instructs them in repairing, which leads them on a side-trek to fight a Lovecraftian horror from beneath the sea. Then Jana’s father appears for the third arc—a man from the modern world who obliquely reveals that this world was constructed by Lovecraftian aliens who also left behind advanced technology. So the last volume is lots of repetitive fight scenes as they race to stop them; and Jungle Girl and the remaining TV crew guy escape to the outside world—or possibly time-loop into Jana’s origin, that part isn’t entirely clear. This book is best when you go “la la la aliens did it” and ignore the attempts at science entirely; megafauna that can’t survive without more oxygen than our modern atmosphere has are everywhere, Jana seems to eat nothing but apex predators which would likely be both disgusting and toxic; etc. It’s a cheesecake-heavy pulp adventure; entertaining, but there isn’t actually any substance there.
Project Superpowers (volume 1) – The superheroes of WW2 (a collection of modified now-public-domain golden age characters) were all trapped in Pandora’s Box by the well-meaning but misguided Fighting Yank. Now in the modern day he’s freeing them and the world is not ready. Alex Ross art, which is as beautiful as ever, but honestly this is too big and too repetitive—it’s a crisis crossover plot, but it doesn’t feel like the characters have earned it because they’re all brand-new to the reader. Like, why do I care if Masquerade has new powers after being in the urn? I didn’t know what her old powers were! (If this featured the Justice Society it would honestly work better.) As it stands, I’m not bothering with the second volume.
A Train Called Love – Garth Ennis writing the goofiest sex and violence maxiseries I’ve read in some time, and no small thanks to the cartoony art style. There’s his standard sex, violence, gore, profanity, and the like; but it’s set as the backdrop to goofy rom-com shenanigans. Honestly, it’s kind of a parody of his usual writing, but it feels like it works?
Control – Andy Diggle again, with a police detective mystery story revolving around a mysterious victim found hanged by an assassin who also killed the lead detective’s partner on his way out. She follows the trail to the conspiracy of The Black Room. It hits a lot of the usual cop detective story tropes and beats, with turnabouts and betrayals and the usual, but it’s not bad as such things go. It’d make a decent movie.
Alice in Wonderland Complete Collection – An illustrated version collecting both of the original books (and edited less than the Disney cartoon, at that). While somewhat better than Dracula in the show vs. tell department, this still spends much more time narrating and commenting on action than actually showing it. There’s also the question of who this is for, as the nonsense of the book that would entertain children it was read to doesn’t work as well for an older child reading this themselves; but I think it’s only appealing to adults as a nostalgic curiosity. (I was also reminded of a quip I came up with in college: “The Walrus and the Carpenter” is about Paul McCartney and Jesus and why they’d make bad roommates.)
The Trials of Sherlock Holmes – Sherlock Holmes himself is accused of murder in a locked-room mystery! This is a cute little to-do with a bunch of levels to it; of course Holmes solves the case but it’s engineered in such a way to keep everyone running around for the full five issues.
This was actually a huge bundle; it was also loaded with lots of Red Sonja, Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, Vampirella, and Army of Darkness. (I wasn’t particularly interested in the first three, and I’d already read the latter from other bundles.)
Overall: I thought that Weaver was pretty decent and the first volume of Jennifer Blood was entertaining. Most of the rest was...fine? I didn’t hit on anything that I stopped partway through (which isn’t always the case!) but most of it, even from established writers, wasn’t their best work.
Terminal Hero – Peter Milligan returns with something else very reminiscent of his Shade: The Changing Man run. The “terminal hero” has an inoperable brain tumor but his friend gets ahold of an illegal new therapy that gives him reality-warping superpowers but also brings all of the worst nonsense from his id out into the world. Honestly, a lot of that id-nonsense (warning: pedophilia, rape, cancer-monsters, self-harm) feels like it’s more for shock value than actually relevant to the character or the story. Anyway, he flounders around for six issues and sorta-kinda deals with some of his problems and then tries to settle into a normal life knowing he’s just one of several time bombs sitting around. Heroic, indeed.
Athena – After the fall of the Greek pantheon, Athena is reborn in the modern world (Ares too, and with Zeus looking over them as an owl—apparently he’s afraid to let his children die but also terrified they’ll kill him). Fortunately, her god-powers keep reactivating in time to deal with Greek myths recurring as modern events. Nominally this is a retelling of the Illiad, but the author’s knowledge of Greek culture and civilization is a bit weak--apparently ancient Greeks were Klingons, very much obsessed with “honorable” combat. After the four main issues this includes a short Athena/Obama crossover comic that’s just as pointless as the rest. This series didn’t have enough actual plot or effective characterization behind its idea and was mostly an excuse to have buxom Athena in revealing armor.
Adolescent Radioactive Blackbelt Hamsters – The monastery is attacked by the reincarnation of Genghis Kahn, and the Dalai Momma calls for her second-favorite students, the five mutant hamsters who are each a caricature of an action-movie star. Most of them die. It takes an issue and a half to introduce her favorite students, The Four: Jackie, Bruce, Chuck and Clint. Then much of the remainder is getting the band back together; apparently Lucy (the only female hamster) was the reason they broke up years before, but Clint doesn’t actually want to rejoin regardless. Then in the last five pages, Kahn wins and kills everyone but Clint, who leaves us on a cliffhanger of going back in time to re-join his brothers and prevent disaster. This was a cute concept, but it’s not quite funny enough—it’s not a close enough parody nor it is sufficiently witty. And the pacing is crap.
Jennifer Blood (volumes 1-2) - Garth Ennis does entertaining work here (with his usual quota of gory and sexualized violence) with a story about a normal housewife and mother who wages an extensive, meticulously-planned campaign of assassination against a mob family. It’s very tongue-in-cheek and Jennifer herself never actually sees any real threats or hardship in her campaign, but that’s okay. Volume 2 sees Al Ewing take over as the writer, and Jenn actually has to face the consequences and fallout of her actions, which is still entertaining but not the visceral thrill of extreme competence the first volume gave. This bundle actually included all 5 volumes of main series and two follow-on volumes (and a prequel starring the Ninjettes), but I didn’t bother continuing after seeing where it was headed.
Weaver (volumes 1-2) – Also apparently published as “Uncanny” and written by Andy Diggle, this is a neat action-movie adventure about a man whose superpower is the ability to temporarily copy someone’s knowledge and abilities by touching them. Turns out that this hasn’t made his life better, and he’s forcibly dragged into the complex machinations of the small number of other “active” people in the world. Two volumes, a complete story, good pacing with lots of twists and turns. (The ending is a little pat, but acceptable.) This was solid!
Raise the Dead – Oh, look, zombies. Incredibly bog-standard, by-the-books horror/splatter zombie story. Characters are introduced and killed off almost as quickly; no explanation or resolution is given for the zombies. This feels like they had ideas for zombie attacks but couldn’t get hired to write guest issues of Walking Dead so they just put them here.
Super Zombies – More zombies! Genetically-modified foods containing vaccines and human DNA caused “KHR syndrome” around the world until “the world’s smartest man” created a vaccine for it...which causes people to spontaneously develop superpowers. Then a decade later, instead of getting superpowers, people start turning into zombies—including all the existing heroes. Fortunately or not, they’re “smart zombies” who mostly keep functioning as long as they eat some people here and there, which means a nice slow-rolling apocalypse with multiple groups of supers fighting with each other. Spoiler: The “KHR virus” (the writers don’t actually understand how viruses or vaccines work) was manmade by various governments who fucked it up by not accounting for the rare “negative sequence” in human DNA, and then the hero’s cure fucked everything up further. On one hand, this is a slightly different twist on the zombie formula; but on the other hand, the backstory is all based in real-world bullshit conspiracies that I no longer have patience for.
The Complete Dracula – Bram Stoker’s original novel in illustrated form, with some beautiful artwork but no surprises. (They slightly abridged it, but not significantly.) I think perhaps the biggest problem is that by hewing so closely to the original text, the artwork…is kind of superfluous? Everything is told, so there isn’t much need to show.
Prophecy – A hilariously mashed-up “crisis crossover” of most of the characters Dynamite was publishing at the time, including Red Sonja, Vampirella, Ash Williams, Re-Animator, Athena, Sherlock Holmes, and Dracula. Sonja chases an evil sorcerer into the year 2012 where he summons evil gods to help end the world as per the Mayan calendar, and everyone else teams up to stop him. Lots of splash panels and very little plot; it’s a fanservice book.
Dejah Thoris: Gardens of Mars – Re-imagined from Burroughs' John Carter of Mars pulp stories, this is the story of a princess of the red Martians who wishes to restore the lush life the planet once had. Amy Chu is doing her best, but it’s…very true to the pulp style. Dejah herself is naïve and honestly kind of useless, but she’s running around in gold go-go boots and pasties in the Martian desert and that’s what the fans are here for. (There are a bunch of references to red Martians being “hatched”—why do they have mammaries, then? And how the hell do their hips work?), Honestly, while Burroughs had some cool ideas, I think the best of them have been re-envisioned as backstory for DC’s Martian Manhunter and this doesn’t hold my interest.
Thun’Da – Whereas this is re-imagined from the 50s comic series Thun’Da King of the Congo by Frank Frazetta and Gardner Fox. A military helicopter crashes somewhere in Africa, and the only survivor has both lost his memory (but none of his skills) and somehow been transported to a strange prehistoric world. There are dinosaurs and saber-tooth tigers and neanderthals (but oddly, only male ones) and flashbacks to his previous life as a horrible monster of a man. He finds a citadel full of modern (primitive) humans and learns their language just in time for an attack by talking apes; and by saving the day (with the help of a magic gong and a giant snake) he gets named as the legendary savior “Thun’da.” An entertaining bit about this collection is that it reprints some of the original stories, which makes it easy to see which parts they used and which they rearranged or ignored (and how little “continuity” mattered in the old days!)
Jungle Girl Omnibus – Jungle Girl is “what if Tarzan but with cheesecake?” and this is a collection by Frank Cho, a man who understands cheesecake. A modern-day plane with a TV crew onboard crashes and is rescued by Jana the Jungle Girl, who shepherds them through a jungle full of prehistoric dangers. (It doesn’t go well for them, but most of them are opium smugglers anyway so it’s not terrible when disasters while fleeing the dirt-people kill them.) Then they chase a downed space shuttle to a mysterious God-Mountain and find a beached submarine that the captain instructs them in repairing, which leads them on a side-trek to fight a Lovecraftian horror from beneath the sea. Then Jana’s father appears for the third arc—a man from the modern world who obliquely reveals that this world was constructed by Lovecraftian aliens who also left behind advanced technology. So the last volume is lots of repetitive fight scenes as they race to stop them; and Jungle Girl and the remaining TV crew guy escape to the outside world—or possibly time-loop into Jana’s origin, that part isn’t entirely clear. This book is best when you go “la la la aliens did it” and ignore the attempts at science entirely; megafauna that can’t survive without more oxygen than our modern atmosphere has are everywhere, Jana seems to eat nothing but apex predators which would likely be both disgusting and toxic; etc. It’s a cheesecake-heavy pulp adventure; entertaining, but there isn’t actually any substance there.
Project Superpowers (volume 1) – The superheroes of WW2 (a collection of modified now-public-domain golden age characters) were all trapped in Pandora’s Box by the well-meaning but misguided Fighting Yank. Now in the modern day he’s freeing them and the world is not ready. Alex Ross art, which is as beautiful as ever, but honestly this is too big and too repetitive—it’s a crisis crossover plot, but it doesn’t feel like the characters have earned it because they’re all brand-new to the reader. Like, why do I care if Masquerade has new powers after being in the urn? I didn’t know what her old powers were! (If this featured the Justice Society it would honestly work better.) As it stands, I’m not bothering with the second volume.
A Train Called Love – Garth Ennis writing the goofiest sex and violence maxiseries I’ve read in some time, and no small thanks to the cartoony art style. There’s his standard sex, violence, gore, profanity, and the like; but it’s set as the backdrop to goofy rom-com shenanigans. Honestly, it’s kind of a parody of his usual writing, but it feels like it works?
Control – Andy Diggle again, with a police detective mystery story revolving around a mysterious victim found hanged by an assassin who also killed the lead detective’s partner on his way out. She follows the trail to the conspiracy of The Black Room. It hits a lot of the usual cop detective story tropes and beats, with turnabouts and betrayals and the usual, but it’s not bad as such things go. It’d make a decent movie.
Alice in Wonderland Complete Collection – An illustrated version collecting both of the original books (and edited less than the Disney cartoon, at that). While somewhat better than Dracula in the show vs. tell department, this still spends much more time narrating and commenting on action than actually showing it. There’s also the question of who this is for, as the nonsense of the book that would entertain children it was read to doesn’t work as well for an older child reading this themselves; but I think it’s only appealing to adults as a nostalgic curiosity. (I was also reminded of a quip I came up with in college: “The Walrus and the Carpenter” is about Paul McCartney and Jesus and why they’d make bad roommates.)
The Trials of Sherlock Holmes – Sherlock Holmes himself is accused of murder in a locked-room mystery! This is a cute little to-do with a bunch of levels to it; of course Holmes solves the case but it’s engineered in such a way to keep everyone running around for the full five issues.
This was actually a huge bundle; it was also loaded with lots of Red Sonja, Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, Vampirella, and Army of Darkness. (I wasn’t particularly interested in the first three, and I’d already read the latter from other bundles.)
Overall: I thought that Weaver was pretty decent and the first volume of Jennifer Blood was entertaining. Most of the rest was...fine? I didn’t hit on anything that I stopped partway through (which isn’t always the case!) but most of it, even from established writers, wasn’t their best work.
