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chuckroAnnoyingly, most of these came as insanely high-res gigantic pdfs, and I needed to manually use Acrobat to reduce the size so that I could load them onto my ReMarkable. This was a common theme of several recent comics bundles, and probably related to the fact I fell far behind on my comic bundles over the past year.
Autumnal - An eight-issue complete series about a woman whose estranged mother dies, bringing her and her daughter back to the strange, seemingly-idyllic hometown she left decades before. Though it has a slow start-up, this is definitely a horror comic. And while most of the early parts and the mystery-solving aspect work reasonably well, the ending is a mish-mash of tropes and doesn’t quite come together thematically; and the final sequence feels really forced. Basically, once you figure out what kind of story you’re in, everything else is predictable.
The Last Book You’ll Ever Read - Speaking of horror stories, this is another one where a mysterious power is moving humanity, though in this case it seems to be one woman's book about how we're all just animals and society must collapse. It doesn't have nearly enough material to harp on for eight issues, and on top of that it doesn't actually have an ending. It fills a lot of the interim with nudity, cartoonish gore, and fantasy splash panels that it's very unclear how "real" they're supposed to be. The characters are one-note and do everything in service of keeping the plot moving. I was unimpressed.
Heathen (volume 1) - This was cute and had some clever bits. A cast-out lesbian viking goes on a quest to release the captive queen of the Valkyries and topple Odin's repressive reign. The message is familiar but the wit is there. I might look for the next volume.
Fearscape (volume 1) - Henry Henry is an asshole protagonist and unreliable narrator, constantly using his pretentious inner monologue to attempt to contradict what we actually see happen and blaming his problems on everyone but himself. He cons his way into the Fearscape, the realm of human dreams and imagination, by pretending to be his elderly mentor. And then he fucks everything up. The last half of the last issue attempts to redeem Henry by revealing his tragic backstory, but it’s way too late by that point, because by then I hated him and the gimmick was tired. (If it had been a single issue or a multiple-viewpoints thing it probably would have worked better.) This had a couple of interesting ideas but they couldn’t save it from Henry Henry.
Resonant (volume 1) – A post-apocalyptic tale, this follows the story of a man and his family living in the woods and hiding from “the waves”, some sort of periodic madness that can be predicted by crickets and defended from by meditation. This is barely a prologue in five issues, taking the father off to an island as a captive and pulling one of the children into a Christian cult, and introducing a different crazy cult that’s clearly about to cause problems. (The influence of The Walking Dead really shows.) There are some interesting ideas here, but not enough that I’m going to follow up unless volume 2 drops in my lap.
Shadow Service (volume 1) – Gina Meyer is a private detective with witchy magical superpowers (talking to animals, classic occultism tricks, nasty curses) and she goes on various mystery misadventures. She’s another variant on the Jessica Jones or October Daye archetype. Cranky, down-on-her-luck, gets beaten up more than is probably realistic. Turns out, there are other magicians out there, some of whom work for the government, and she’s not as special as she thinks she is…but she is very clever and doesn’t trust them. If you’re looking for an adventure that thematically owes a lot to John Constantine, this is for you. It’s also another one that if I could be sure would wrap up in 1-2 more volumes I’d be interested in hunting down.
The Plot (volume 1) – A mysterious monster kills a successful entrepreneur and his wife, so their kids are sent to live with their estranged uncle at the haunted family home. The monster, which I quickly nicknamed “Bog Thing,” keeps showing up in sequences that make it unclear what’s real, what’s imagined, and what’s metaphor. I think everybody’s supposed to be hallucinating, but who knows? Apparently the second volume concludes the story, but I can tell the mythology isn’t going to end up coherent enough for me to care—the “you must give to receive” family motto is clearly going to just be “human sacrifice for prosperity” again.
Money Shot (volume 1) - This was a fun one: In a near future where interstellar travel has been discovered but there’s no grant funding for it, a team of scientists decide to fund their experiments by having sex with aliens and selling the videos online. It’s a sci-fi sex comedy that manages to has the feel of 90s sex comedy films with much less cringe. (Also, it somehow manages to have much stronger characters AND less gratuitous nudity than The Last Book You’ll Ever Read.) Also a plus: the first volume is a complete story.
Human Remains - Upon reflection, I’m kind of surprised I don’t read more things that make me say, “Oh, this is a reaction to covid.” This is a sci-fi horror story about a plague of “life-forms” that emerge from portals and murder anyone being too loud or emotional, particularly in public. This is a pretty good story of rolling worldwide tragedy and how people deal with it; only slightly different from the recent past.
I Walk With Monsters - A teenager and her sorta-werewolf friend hunt down child abusers, hoping to eventually find the “important man” who took away her brother years before. (This is a complete story; they find him fairly soon into it.) This skirts around the actual child abuse, which is probably for the best, but the flashbacks and current events are sufficiently jumbled and not artistically distinct enough that it becomes hard to suss out the sequence of events. That, and the scene where they take out the wannabe serial killer in the first issue is probably the best scene in the entire book and I’m disappointed they didn’t give us more of that. I realize that I shouldn’t complain because it’s a full story in one volume, but I think this would have been better with a sixth issue squeezed in to give the story a bit more time to breathe and perhaps foreshadow the ending a little more.
Barbaric (volume 1) – A Conan-style barbarian with a talking axe is cursed by witches to only do what is right. He really wanted to just continue his life of drinking, fighting and fucking, but nope! He’s a protagonist now. He meets a pretty girl who turns out to be a necromancer in need and takes on a zombie cult. There’s nothing brilliant about it, but it’s a fun sword and sorcery parody thing, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, including the point where the evil wizard turns into a giant snake for no particular reason. This I’d totally read more of.
Songs for the Dead (volume 1) – And speaking of necromancers in pseudo-medieval settings, here we find Bethany, a bard/necromancer looking for heroic adventure to prove that necromancers aren’t all that bad. And Bethany is the kind of earnest hero that just makes everybody else want to help her (or at least save her from her own bad ideas). I’ll admit, I can’t tell if the author has a huge world bible built up towards this or is very cleverly pantsing the history and all the different factions; but I’d wager good money they’re a DM when they aren’t writing comics. And this is clearly intended as the beginning of a much larger story, but I’m not sure it’ll actually get enough issues to pay off and I’d prefer to wait and see.
Hollow Heart - A queer love story between a zombie cyborg construct and the engineer sent to fix him. It’s a horror story about control and abuse and the monster is the victim; and it doesn’t end happily, but not because of the monster’s actions. Also I think there’s only one straight person depicted in the entire story.
Sera and the Royal Stars (volume 1) – Sera, princess of Parsa, is charged by the god Mitra to free the royal stars (apparently gods bound on earth, a situation that has screwed up the seasons), a task her mother was also charged with. This couldn’t come at a worse time, because her evil uncle has been trying to conquer the city with his army. Torn between her duty to her family and the stars, Sera goes on an adventure through the underworld, reveals the nature of her enemies and frees several of the stars, but then turns back towards home. This is another case where I’d go looking for other volumes if I had a reassurance that it would have a proper ending—it’s got a feeling of deep mythology behind it but also that it’ll get canceled on a cliffhanger with nothing resolved.
Vagrant Queen (volume 1) – The main character actually says, “Three, two, one, let’s jam” as she starts up her spaceship at one point; and this obviously owes a lot to Cowboy Bebop. A deposed queen who is now the galaxy’s most wanted picks up a scruffy-headed nerf herder for a heist into the galactic prison where she thinks her mother is being held. Explosions, chases, cons, and backstabbings abound. I didn’t think it was amazing, but I give them credit for having a complete story in the first volume.
Engineward – On a desert colony world long after Earth has faded from memory, resources are scarce, people fear the alien “shades”, and the god-like Celestials control everything; but a good engineward can make scavenged technology work. And when our heroes reawaken an ancient ghoulem head that tells of an unactivated terraforming device, it gives them the means to upend the entire status quo. This is a 12-issue full series and the worldbuilding pays off, though the character arcs end up a bit truncated (the humans basically finish their story when they decide to revolt two-thirds of the way through; the Celestials’ story is hurt by the fact there are 13 of them each playing their own politics and there just isn’t enough time to flesh them all out). Not amazing, but interesting; the pacing could have been better but I enjoyed it.
Wasted Space (volume 1) is another sci-fi space odyssey thing, but the lousy art really turned me off. And I’m just not feeling Vampire: The Masquerade (volume 1); the tie-in fiction for World of Darkness tends to focus on the aspects of the games I don’t care about, and Vampire is worse than most.
Overall: The first volumes of Heathen, Barbaric and Money Shot are fun on their own even without the promise of more. I’d want to check back in a year or two to see if Songs for the Dead, Shadow Service, and Sera and the Royal Stars actually managed to pay off their premises. Engineward was definitely the best of the standalones.
Autumnal - An eight-issue complete series about a woman whose estranged mother dies, bringing her and her daughter back to the strange, seemingly-idyllic hometown she left decades before. Though it has a slow start-up, this is definitely a horror comic. And while most of the early parts and the mystery-solving aspect work reasonably well, the ending is a mish-mash of tropes and doesn’t quite come together thematically; and the final sequence feels really forced. Basically, once you figure out what kind of story you’re in, everything else is predictable.
The Last Book You’ll Ever Read - Speaking of horror stories, this is another one where a mysterious power is moving humanity, though in this case it seems to be one woman's book about how we're all just animals and society must collapse. It doesn't have nearly enough material to harp on for eight issues, and on top of that it doesn't actually have an ending. It fills a lot of the interim with nudity, cartoonish gore, and fantasy splash panels that it's very unclear how "real" they're supposed to be. The characters are one-note and do everything in service of keeping the plot moving. I was unimpressed.
Heathen (volume 1) - This was cute and had some clever bits. A cast-out lesbian viking goes on a quest to release the captive queen of the Valkyries and topple Odin's repressive reign. The message is familiar but the wit is there. I might look for the next volume.
Fearscape (volume 1) - Henry Henry is an asshole protagonist and unreliable narrator, constantly using his pretentious inner monologue to attempt to contradict what we actually see happen and blaming his problems on everyone but himself. He cons his way into the Fearscape, the realm of human dreams and imagination, by pretending to be his elderly mentor. And then he fucks everything up. The last half of the last issue attempts to redeem Henry by revealing his tragic backstory, but it’s way too late by that point, because by then I hated him and the gimmick was tired. (If it had been a single issue or a multiple-viewpoints thing it probably would have worked better.) This had a couple of interesting ideas but they couldn’t save it from Henry Henry.
Resonant (volume 1) – A post-apocalyptic tale, this follows the story of a man and his family living in the woods and hiding from “the waves”, some sort of periodic madness that can be predicted by crickets and defended from by meditation. This is barely a prologue in five issues, taking the father off to an island as a captive and pulling one of the children into a Christian cult, and introducing a different crazy cult that’s clearly about to cause problems. (The influence of The Walking Dead really shows.) There are some interesting ideas here, but not enough that I’m going to follow up unless volume 2 drops in my lap.
Shadow Service (volume 1) – Gina Meyer is a private detective with witchy magical superpowers (talking to animals, classic occultism tricks, nasty curses) and she goes on various mystery misadventures. She’s another variant on the Jessica Jones or October Daye archetype. Cranky, down-on-her-luck, gets beaten up more than is probably realistic. Turns out, there are other magicians out there, some of whom work for the government, and she’s not as special as she thinks she is…but she is very clever and doesn’t trust them. If you’re looking for an adventure that thematically owes a lot to John Constantine, this is for you. It’s also another one that if I could be sure would wrap up in 1-2 more volumes I’d be interested in hunting down.
The Plot (volume 1) – A mysterious monster kills a successful entrepreneur and his wife, so their kids are sent to live with their estranged uncle at the haunted family home. The monster, which I quickly nicknamed “Bog Thing,” keeps showing up in sequences that make it unclear what’s real, what’s imagined, and what’s metaphor. I think everybody’s supposed to be hallucinating, but who knows? Apparently the second volume concludes the story, but I can tell the mythology isn’t going to end up coherent enough for me to care—the “you must give to receive” family motto is clearly going to just be “human sacrifice for prosperity” again.
Money Shot (volume 1) - This was a fun one: In a near future where interstellar travel has been discovered but there’s no grant funding for it, a team of scientists decide to fund their experiments by having sex with aliens and selling the videos online. It’s a sci-fi sex comedy that manages to has the feel of 90s sex comedy films with much less cringe. (Also, it somehow manages to have much stronger characters AND less gratuitous nudity than The Last Book You’ll Ever Read.) Also a plus: the first volume is a complete story.
Human Remains - Upon reflection, I’m kind of surprised I don’t read more things that make me say, “Oh, this is a reaction to covid.” This is a sci-fi horror story about a plague of “life-forms” that emerge from portals and murder anyone being too loud or emotional, particularly in public. This is a pretty good story of rolling worldwide tragedy and how people deal with it; only slightly different from the recent past.
I Walk With Monsters - A teenager and her sorta-werewolf friend hunt down child abusers, hoping to eventually find the “important man” who took away her brother years before. (This is a complete story; they find him fairly soon into it.) This skirts around the actual child abuse, which is probably for the best, but the flashbacks and current events are sufficiently jumbled and not artistically distinct enough that it becomes hard to suss out the sequence of events. That, and the scene where they take out the wannabe serial killer in the first issue is probably the best scene in the entire book and I’m disappointed they didn’t give us more of that. I realize that I shouldn’t complain because it’s a full story in one volume, but I think this would have been better with a sixth issue squeezed in to give the story a bit more time to breathe and perhaps foreshadow the ending a little more.
Barbaric (volume 1) – A Conan-style barbarian with a talking axe is cursed by witches to only do what is right. He really wanted to just continue his life of drinking, fighting and fucking, but nope! He’s a protagonist now. He meets a pretty girl who turns out to be a necromancer in need and takes on a zombie cult. There’s nothing brilliant about it, but it’s a fun sword and sorcery parody thing, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, including the point where the evil wizard turns into a giant snake for no particular reason. This I’d totally read more of.
Songs for the Dead (volume 1) – And speaking of necromancers in pseudo-medieval settings, here we find Bethany, a bard/necromancer looking for heroic adventure to prove that necromancers aren’t all that bad. And Bethany is the kind of earnest hero that just makes everybody else want to help her (or at least save her from her own bad ideas). I’ll admit, I can’t tell if the author has a huge world bible built up towards this or is very cleverly pantsing the history and all the different factions; but I’d wager good money they’re a DM when they aren’t writing comics. And this is clearly intended as the beginning of a much larger story, but I’m not sure it’ll actually get enough issues to pay off and I’d prefer to wait and see.
Hollow Heart - A queer love story between a zombie cyborg construct and the engineer sent to fix him. It’s a horror story about control and abuse and the monster is the victim; and it doesn’t end happily, but not because of the monster’s actions. Also I think there’s only one straight person depicted in the entire story.
Sera and the Royal Stars (volume 1) – Sera, princess of Parsa, is charged by the god Mitra to free the royal stars (apparently gods bound on earth, a situation that has screwed up the seasons), a task her mother was also charged with. This couldn’t come at a worse time, because her evil uncle has been trying to conquer the city with his army. Torn between her duty to her family and the stars, Sera goes on an adventure through the underworld, reveals the nature of her enemies and frees several of the stars, but then turns back towards home. This is another case where I’d go looking for other volumes if I had a reassurance that it would have a proper ending—it’s got a feeling of deep mythology behind it but also that it’ll get canceled on a cliffhanger with nothing resolved.
Vagrant Queen (volume 1) – The main character actually says, “Three, two, one, let’s jam” as she starts up her spaceship at one point; and this obviously owes a lot to Cowboy Bebop. A deposed queen who is now the galaxy’s most wanted picks up a scruffy-headed nerf herder for a heist into the galactic prison where she thinks her mother is being held. Explosions, chases, cons, and backstabbings abound. I didn’t think it was amazing, but I give them credit for having a complete story in the first volume.
Engineward – On a desert colony world long after Earth has faded from memory, resources are scarce, people fear the alien “shades”, and the god-like Celestials control everything; but a good engineward can make scavenged technology work. And when our heroes reawaken an ancient ghoulem head that tells of an unactivated terraforming device, it gives them the means to upend the entire status quo. This is a 12-issue full series and the worldbuilding pays off, though the character arcs end up a bit truncated (the humans basically finish their story when they decide to revolt two-thirds of the way through; the Celestials’ story is hurt by the fact there are 13 of them each playing their own politics and there just isn’t enough time to flesh them all out). Not amazing, but interesting; the pacing could have been better but I enjoyed it.
Wasted Space (volume 1) is another sci-fi space odyssey thing, but the lousy art really turned me off. And I’m just not feeling Vampire: The Masquerade (volume 1); the tie-in fiction for World of Darkness tends to focus on the aspects of the games I don’t care about, and Vampire is worse than most.
Overall: The first volumes of Heathen, Barbaric and Money Shot are fun on their own even without the promise of more. I’d want to check back in a year or two to see if Songs for the Dead, Shadow Service, and Sera and the Royal Stars actually managed to pay off their premises. Engineward was definitely the best of the standalones.
