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chuckroQueen Crab - A Kickstarter-funded standalone origin story, about a woman who gets pushed off a cruise ship and wakes up with crab claws for hands; though that’s more than halfway through and most of the story is just establishing her shitty life in Brooklyn and the various twists and turns of her romantic endeavors. I feel like this was supposed to be a full miniseries (it’s only 50 pages) and actually intended to pay off the time spent on her husband’s dead mistress or her abusive boss—it’s too much run-up for what it actually pays off. I’m guessing it was intended to be a bigger thing and didn’t pan out.
Retrovirus - Another Kickstarter-funded standalone, though this one fits together better as a story best described as “Jurassic Park with neanderthals.” A scientist spurned by her fiancé joins a mysterious research team in the Antarctic which it turns out has cloned neanderthals but also the virus that sterilized and wiped them out—and that virus has jumped to the research team. So there’s a race to find a cure but also the problem of an intelligent and super-strong hominid species that you know is eventually going to break out and kill everyone. The sexual politics are also…messy, to say the least.
Denver – A meteor impacts the moon and causes sea levels on Earth to rise 5,000 feet, leaving Denver a center of political power. But beyond that setting, it’s a fairly standard sci-fi pulp crime story, starring a middle-aged police detective whose wife is kidnapped by blackmailers with big plans for a citywide takeover. Pulp-novel stuff with a standard twist, the usual amount of tits and gore, and no surprises.
Killing Time in America – A group of Europeans pretend to be a tourist family and go to Florida to murder lots of Americans and film it to send home. Sex, violence, and less-than-perfectly planned serial killings.
Rage – Lotta action movies in this bundle! We open with a man and his daughter seeing “The Omega Man” in an NYC theater, before his evil ex spirits her away and the world goes crazy with almost everyone afflicted with murderous rage. So then it’s a survival travelogue (with plenty of flashbacks to tortured backstory) to get across the country to the daughter. It gets…pretty ridiculous, actually. Overwrought almost to the point of parody, but without a real climax and with a very odd denouement. This references both covid-19 and a fictitious second pandemic some time after—clearly, this was Palmiottti’s lockdown book, and it shows in a lot of ways.
The Tattered Man - A horror story about a vengeful spirit that rose from a Holocaust concentration camp as a suit of rags, and its revival as a spirit of vengeance in Manhattan in the present when the owner is killed by a group of thugs. This was very clearly written to be an origin story for Ragman but for whatever reason wasn’t used at DC—probably because it’s just too damn dark. (It also cribs heavily from The Crow.)
Trailblazer – Our hero is a paid assassin, but he’s also a nice Catholic boy who supports the nuns at the orphanage he grew up at. But a job goes bad, the nuns die, and in exchange for testifying against all the crime bosses, the federal government makes him a deal to join Project Trailblazer: The ultimate witness protection, a time machine that can send him back to 1868. Fast forward a year, and he’s a gun-toting wild west lawman. But the big crime boss escapes prison, finds the government’s best-kept secret, and brings his gang back to the past. So the government sends a suicide “clean-up crew” to kill everybody. Big gunfight, everyone but the hero dies, and he cleans up the evidence and rides off into the sunset with his girlfriend. This is a particularly ridiculous premise, I have to say, and I like to think I’m pretty good at suspending my disbelief.
The Pro was a re-read because I have the original printing kicking around somewhere; it pulls no punches with the crude parody. A streetwalker is given superpowers by a thin parody of the Watcher and curses a lot at the even-thinner parody Justice League. There’s a “Men of Steel, Women of Kleenex” joke. There’s a sendup of costumed superheroes in general that you’ll miss because it’s South Park style comedy. Basically, it’s everything you’d expect, given the premise.
Twilight Experiment (#1-6) – The world’s two major superheroes both seemingly died a decade ago in a city-wrecking battle, but Serenity left behind a son and the scientist who created them has a daughter—and those two become our main characters. This quickly turns into a “Superman is evil” plot, as the goal of the superhuman called The Righteous is to take over the world and fix everything, and kill anybody in his way. And honestly…he’s not wrong? Benevolent dictatorship by an immortal god-king is, in fact, the fastest and simplest way to fix what’s wrong with our society, and if he could stay on-message the story would be very different. Unfortunately, he’s the villain of the piece, and while he’s doing this, a “temporal curtain” that separates Earth from an alien world is collapsing and threatening to destroy both—so The Righteous needs to act stupidly against his own stated aims and refuse to fix it so that the teenage heroes can force him to save the world. There are a LOT of ideas crammed into this, and some of them are very good, but it’s too overstuffed and the execution is lacking.
Weapon of God – And then another ridiculous action movie. This one’s premise is that the Vatican hides a secret bloodline of “The Weapon of God” who is trained to come out and fight evil when the devil rears his head; and this generation’s has been called to deal with a terrorist called Apollyon. Interestingly, the only supernatural happenings are within the realm of “deniability,” which is tonally clever for something building on loose Catholic mythology.
The Last Resort (#1-5) – A by-the-book, shot-by-shot zombie movie set on a resort island, with the usual set of stock characters, most of whom get bloodily dismembered. Perfect for anyone who likes seeing faces bitten off.
Forager – A family goes on vacation on a spaceship cruise liner: Mom is a corporate ladder-climber who can’t step away from work, Dad is a sci-fi writer who hasn’t gotten his next book off the ground, and little Ellie is autistic and hears angels singing to her in space. Fast-forward a decade, and the alien “angels” are teaching humanity their science and Ellie is at the forefront, leading humanity’s first big mission to deep space in a ship called the Forager. This is another one where too much is just crammed into a single 65-page story. The second half feels like it should have been spread out across another five issues of a miniseries and instead that got crunched into a quarter of an issue, mostly of exposition. At least it resolves?
Wrestling With Demons – A man and his daughter drive into the wrong random town, and he ends up needing to enter a demon-wrestling tournament to rescue her. Fortunately, he’s an MMA fighter, and also has a dead wife to provide angelic backup in the clinch (which is good, because demons cheat).
There’s a Creator-Owned Heroes Collection that I skimmed but didn’t see anything that strongly appealed to me in. This bundle also included a few issues of The Monolith, which I have the original printing of; and G.I. Zombie which didn’t interest me.
Overall: I met Jimmy Palmiotti at a convention around a decade ago, which is an experience I highly recommend because he’s a funny guy who tells a good con story. His writing, on the other hand, is fairly hit-or-miss—the quality of his editor (and co-writers, of whom Amanda Conner is by far the best) often shows in the final products, and honestly this bundle is mostly his “b-side tracks.”
Retrovirus - Another Kickstarter-funded standalone, though this one fits together better as a story best described as “Jurassic Park with neanderthals.” A scientist spurned by her fiancé joins a mysterious research team in the Antarctic which it turns out has cloned neanderthals but also the virus that sterilized and wiped them out—and that virus has jumped to the research team. So there’s a race to find a cure but also the problem of an intelligent and super-strong hominid species that you know is eventually going to break out and kill everyone. The sexual politics are also…messy, to say the least.
Denver – A meteor impacts the moon and causes sea levels on Earth to rise 5,000 feet, leaving Denver a center of political power. But beyond that setting, it’s a fairly standard sci-fi pulp crime story, starring a middle-aged police detective whose wife is kidnapped by blackmailers with big plans for a citywide takeover. Pulp-novel stuff with a standard twist, the usual amount of tits and gore, and no surprises.
Killing Time in America – A group of Europeans pretend to be a tourist family and go to Florida to murder lots of Americans and film it to send home. Sex, violence, and less-than-perfectly planned serial killings.
Rage – Lotta action movies in this bundle! We open with a man and his daughter seeing “The Omega Man” in an NYC theater, before his evil ex spirits her away and the world goes crazy with almost everyone afflicted with murderous rage. So then it’s a survival travelogue (with plenty of flashbacks to tortured backstory) to get across the country to the daughter. It gets…pretty ridiculous, actually. Overwrought almost to the point of parody, but without a real climax and with a very odd denouement. This references both covid-19 and a fictitious second pandemic some time after—clearly, this was Palmiottti’s lockdown book, and it shows in a lot of ways.
The Tattered Man - A horror story about a vengeful spirit that rose from a Holocaust concentration camp as a suit of rags, and its revival as a spirit of vengeance in Manhattan in the present when the owner is killed by a group of thugs. This was very clearly written to be an origin story for Ragman but for whatever reason wasn’t used at DC—probably because it’s just too damn dark. (It also cribs heavily from The Crow.)
Trailblazer – Our hero is a paid assassin, but he’s also a nice Catholic boy who supports the nuns at the orphanage he grew up at. But a job goes bad, the nuns die, and in exchange for testifying against all the crime bosses, the federal government makes him a deal to join Project Trailblazer: The ultimate witness protection, a time machine that can send him back to 1868. Fast forward a year, and he’s a gun-toting wild west lawman. But the big crime boss escapes prison, finds the government’s best-kept secret, and brings his gang back to the past. So the government sends a suicide “clean-up crew” to kill everybody. Big gunfight, everyone but the hero dies, and he cleans up the evidence and rides off into the sunset with his girlfriend. This is a particularly ridiculous premise, I have to say, and I like to think I’m pretty good at suspending my disbelief.
The Pro was a re-read because I have the original printing kicking around somewhere; it pulls no punches with the crude parody. A streetwalker is given superpowers by a thin parody of the Watcher and curses a lot at the even-thinner parody Justice League. There’s a “Men of Steel, Women of Kleenex” joke. There’s a sendup of costumed superheroes in general that you’ll miss because it’s South Park style comedy. Basically, it’s everything you’d expect, given the premise.
Twilight Experiment (#1-6) – The world’s two major superheroes both seemingly died a decade ago in a city-wrecking battle, but Serenity left behind a son and the scientist who created them has a daughter—and those two become our main characters. This quickly turns into a “Superman is evil” plot, as the goal of the superhuman called The Righteous is to take over the world and fix everything, and kill anybody in his way. And honestly…he’s not wrong? Benevolent dictatorship by an immortal god-king is, in fact, the fastest and simplest way to fix what’s wrong with our society, and if he could stay on-message the story would be very different. Unfortunately, he’s the villain of the piece, and while he’s doing this, a “temporal curtain” that separates Earth from an alien world is collapsing and threatening to destroy both—so The Righteous needs to act stupidly against his own stated aims and refuse to fix it so that the teenage heroes can force him to save the world. There are a LOT of ideas crammed into this, and some of them are very good, but it’s too overstuffed and the execution is lacking.
Weapon of God – And then another ridiculous action movie. This one’s premise is that the Vatican hides a secret bloodline of “The Weapon of God” who is trained to come out and fight evil when the devil rears his head; and this generation’s has been called to deal with a terrorist called Apollyon. Interestingly, the only supernatural happenings are within the realm of “deniability,” which is tonally clever for something building on loose Catholic mythology.
The Last Resort (#1-5) – A by-the-book, shot-by-shot zombie movie set on a resort island, with the usual set of stock characters, most of whom get bloodily dismembered. Perfect for anyone who likes seeing faces bitten off.
Forager – A family goes on vacation on a spaceship cruise liner: Mom is a corporate ladder-climber who can’t step away from work, Dad is a sci-fi writer who hasn’t gotten his next book off the ground, and little Ellie is autistic and hears angels singing to her in space. Fast-forward a decade, and the alien “angels” are teaching humanity their science and Ellie is at the forefront, leading humanity’s first big mission to deep space in a ship called the Forager. This is another one where too much is just crammed into a single 65-page story. The second half feels like it should have been spread out across another five issues of a miniseries and instead that got crunched into a quarter of an issue, mostly of exposition. At least it resolves?
Wrestling With Demons – A man and his daughter drive into the wrong random town, and he ends up needing to enter a demon-wrestling tournament to rescue her. Fortunately, he’s an MMA fighter, and also has a dead wife to provide angelic backup in the clinch (which is good, because demons cheat).
There’s a Creator-Owned Heroes Collection that I skimmed but didn’t see anything that strongly appealed to me in. This bundle also included a few issues of The Monolith, which I have the original printing of; and G.I. Zombie which didn’t interest me.
Overall: I met Jimmy Palmiotti at a convention around a decade ago, which is an experience I highly recommend because he’s a funny guy who tells a good con story. His writing, on the other hand, is fairly hit-or-miss—the quality of his editor (and co-writers, of whom Amanda Conner is by far the best) often shows in the final products, and honestly this bundle is mostly his “b-side tracks.”
