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chuckroBettie Page #1 - I have to guess this started with somebody who loved Bettie Page pinup art and wanted an excuse to string together stories using pinup splash panels. It’s not bad for a first issue, it’s got a “Danger Girl” kind of pulp thing going, but I’m not excited enough about Page as the selling point to look for more.
Skin and Earth (volume 1) – It’s a comic illustrating a concept album; I didn’t listen to the music, but it honestly has the same problem a lot of storytelling albums do: The songs and individual scenes might work or not, but the whole thing strings together with only the most tenuous logic and the flow of the overall work is really rough. In this case, each emotional beat and plot reveal feels like whiplash from the last one. I’d have loved this when I was a pretentious 16-year-old wishing it was something I could make myself; but I’m 40 now.
Grand Passion – A ridiculous cops ‘n robbers story about a bank-robbing duo and the one clean cop in a town full of corruption. Kinda fun, in that it embraces a lot of the absurdity the story requires to function. Warning that it features instant love at first sight, a lot of phonetically spelled out southern accents, and someone getting shot in the head twice and walking around afterwards. (And nudity, but honestly, I feel like that bothers people less than the other three things.)
The Twilight Zone (volume 1) – Featuring the story of a banker who arranges an escape from his life just before it falls apart, this really captures the feel of the original TV show with modern trappings. Even the moral core of the story (the guy’s problems, before and during the story, were 100% of his own making) is fitting to the best TV episodes. Kudos to JMS for solid writing.
Chaos: Highway to Hel (volume 1) – A troupe of assorted supernatural creatures try to be the good guys saving humans from other assorted supernatural creatures. I could barely keep straight what was supposed to be going on in this bad World of Darkness fanfic / excuse to draw lots of big boobs.
Tales of Army of Darkness (one shot) – A set of short stories surrounding the events of the movie Army of Darkness. None of them are particularly noteworthy, especially since none of them manage to come up with any jokes that weren’t in the original movie.
Ash VS The Army of Darkness – On the other hand, this picks up after the original movie, with a brief recap and Ash getting fired from S-Mart. But the local high school is also having deadite possession issues, and the principal recruits Ash to pose as a teacher and investigate; and a mysterious government agency is sniffing around as well. This runs a single, complete story arc that’s a fun sequel to the movies and leaves room to continue. (I have no idea if it’s at all connected to the TV show, mind you.)
Bob’s Burgers (volume 1) – Like the TV show, I find this fun in small doses but I don’t like it enough to binge it. Also, this is aimed squarely at fans of the TV show who know the characters and the running gags already, which means that (having only seen half the first season), a bunch of it is lost on me. (Why does the frog story have randomly rhyming dialogue, for instance? I have no idea! It doesn’t seem to be one of the “musical” stories.) I kinda hope that later seasons of the show find other things for Tina to do than make up stories about Jimmy Jr’s butt, because those in particular got old fast.
Art of Atari – This isn’t a graphic novel, it’s a coffee table book, which is a weird thing to see in pdf form. Giant, colorful splashes of original game box and cabinet artwork, interspersed with stories about the creation of Atari and the development of the games. To their credit, box art mattered more to Atari than any other games company, because the games were so simple that imagination drove most of the play experience, and good box art sparked that. I mostly treated this like any coffee table book, flipping through to the games I recognized (I had a 2600 in elementary school and something like 20 games) and appreciating the variety of art as I went along.
This collection also included Undisputed Street Fighter, a similar style book about the fighting game series, but I was never big enough into it for that to catch my interest.
Nancy Drew (Issues #1-5) – Grown-up Nancy is drawn back to her hometown by a mystery, meeting up with her supporting cast she’d left behind and also Frank and Joe Hardy who are back for a visit. This is a fun little adventure that modernizes everything but has a pretty good sense of all the characters and their foibles. Joe Hardy even jumps through a window!
Masks (volume 1) - Alex Ross artwork and a team-up of pulp characters: The Shadow, the Green Hornet, the Spider, the Black Terror, etc. Together, they fight a criminal network who have taken over the New York state government and terrorized the city with armored, faceless goons. This came out in 2012, but it’s shockingly relevant in the post-Trump era…a fact that I’m sure is lost on half the readers. (The best bit was when the goon army was sent to march on Washington and take over the country, and the heroes learn from radio reports that the army was stopped by New Jersey.)
Red Sonja (volumes 1 and 2) – Gail Simone clearly loves Red Sonja as a character, and is will to write her as the Conan-style barbarian badass she is. The first plotline is a dip into Sonja’s past that ties into current events, pairing her with a woman who had been tortured and forced to fight alongside her. The second arc is more episodic, with Sonja on a quest to retrieve the six greatest artisans in the land so a dying king will free 1,000 slaves. Both are totally good times.
The Last Temptation – So, this is a horror-mindfuck comic by Neil Gaiman, featuring Alice Cooper. (And I’m reasonably certain I’ve read this before, presumably from a different bundle years ago.) It’s a fairly standard temptation story; a teenage boy enters a mysterious theater that wasn’t there the day before and the demonic proprietor tries to convince him to give up on life and join the zombie cast. The interesting place it takes my brain is that a common interpretation of the musical Pippin (which I love) is essentially the same story; and in one production I was in the Leading Player was wearing basically the same makeup.
I was moderately interested in Swords of Sorrow until I realized it was a massive crossover of a lot of characters I was only vaguely interested in. I may eventually read it, but not feeling it now.
Overall: There were a fun mix of things in this bundle that I read over the course of a few months; many of them very different. I think Red Sonja and Nancy Drew were fun enough to recommend, of the lot.
Skin and Earth (volume 1) – It’s a comic illustrating a concept album; I didn’t listen to the music, but it honestly has the same problem a lot of storytelling albums do: The songs and individual scenes might work or not, but the whole thing strings together with only the most tenuous logic and the flow of the overall work is really rough. In this case, each emotional beat and plot reveal feels like whiplash from the last one. I’d have loved this when I was a pretentious 16-year-old wishing it was something I could make myself; but I’m 40 now.
Grand Passion – A ridiculous cops ‘n robbers story about a bank-robbing duo and the one clean cop in a town full of corruption. Kinda fun, in that it embraces a lot of the absurdity the story requires to function. Warning that it features instant love at first sight, a lot of phonetically spelled out southern accents, and someone getting shot in the head twice and walking around afterwards. (And nudity, but honestly, I feel like that bothers people less than the other three things.)
The Twilight Zone (volume 1) – Featuring the story of a banker who arranges an escape from his life just before it falls apart, this really captures the feel of the original TV show with modern trappings. Even the moral core of the story (the guy’s problems, before and during the story, were 100% of his own making) is fitting to the best TV episodes. Kudos to JMS for solid writing.
Chaos: Highway to Hel (volume 1) – A troupe of assorted supernatural creatures try to be the good guys saving humans from other assorted supernatural creatures. I could barely keep straight what was supposed to be going on in this bad World of Darkness fanfic / excuse to draw lots of big boobs.
Tales of Army of Darkness (one shot) – A set of short stories surrounding the events of the movie Army of Darkness. None of them are particularly noteworthy, especially since none of them manage to come up with any jokes that weren’t in the original movie.
Ash VS The Army of Darkness – On the other hand, this picks up after the original movie, with a brief recap and Ash getting fired from S-Mart. But the local high school is also having deadite possession issues, and the principal recruits Ash to pose as a teacher and investigate; and a mysterious government agency is sniffing around as well. This runs a single, complete story arc that’s a fun sequel to the movies and leaves room to continue. (I have no idea if it’s at all connected to the TV show, mind you.)
Bob’s Burgers (volume 1) – Like the TV show, I find this fun in small doses but I don’t like it enough to binge it. Also, this is aimed squarely at fans of the TV show who know the characters and the running gags already, which means that (having only seen half the first season), a bunch of it is lost on me. (Why does the frog story have randomly rhyming dialogue, for instance? I have no idea! It doesn’t seem to be one of the “musical” stories.) I kinda hope that later seasons of the show find other things for Tina to do than make up stories about Jimmy Jr’s butt, because those in particular got old fast.
Art of Atari – This isn’t a graphic novel, it’s a coffee table book, which is a weird thing to see in pdf form. Giant, colorful splashes of original game box and cabinet artwork, interspersed with stories about the creation of Atari and the development of the games. To their credit, box art mattered more to Atari than any other games company, because the games were so simple that imagination drove most of the play experience, and good box art sparked that. I mostly treated this like any coffee table book, flipping through to the games I recognized (I had a 2600 in elementary school and something like 20 games) and appreciating the variety of art as I went along.
This collection also included Undisputed Street Fighter, a similar style book about the fighting game series, but I was never big enough into it for that to catch my interest.
Nancy Drew (Issues #1-5) – Grown-up Nancy is drawn back to her hometown by a mystery, meeting up with her supporting cast she’d left behind and also Frank and Joe Hardy who are back for a visit. This is a fun little adventure that modernizes everything but has a pretty good sense of all the characters and their foibles. Joe Hardy even jumps through a window!
Masks (volume 1) - Alex Ross artwork and a team-up of pulp characters: The Shadow, the Green Hornet, the Spider, the Black Terror, etc. Together, they fight a criminal network who have taken over the New York state government and terrorized the city with armored, faceless goons. This came out in 2012, but it’s shockingly relevant in the post-Trump era…a fact that I’m sure is lost on half the readers. (The best bit was when the goon army was sent to march on Washington and take over the country, and the heroes learn from radio reports that the army was stopped by New Jersey.)
Red Sonja (volumes 1 and 2) – Gail Simone clearly loves Red Sonja as a character, and is will to write her as the Conan-style barbarian badass she is. The first plotline is a dip into Sonja’s past that ties into current events, pairing her with a woman who had been tortured and forced to fight alongside her. The second arc is more episodic, with Sonja on a quest to retrieve the six greatest artisans in the land so a dying king will free 1,000 slaves. Both are totally good times.
The Last Temptation – So, this is a horror-mindfuck comic by Neil Gaiman, featuring Alice Cooper. (And I’m reasonably certain I’ve read this before, presumably from a different bundle years ago.) It’s a fairly standard temptation story; a teenage boy enters a mysterious theater that wasn’t there the day before and the demonic proprietor tries to convince him to give up on life and join the zombie cast. The interesting place it takes my brain is that a common interpretation of the musical Pippin (which I love) is essentially the same story; and in one production I was in the Leading Player was wearing basically the same makeup.
I was moderately interested in Swords of Sorrow until I realized it was a massive crossover of a lot of characters I was only vaguely interested in. I may eventually read it, but not feeling it now.
Overall: There were a fun mix of things in this bundle that I read over the course of a few months; many of them very different. I think Red Sonja and Nancy Drew were fun enough to recommend, of the lot.
