Humble Bundle: Image Comics in the 10s
Jun. 28th, 2024 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThere was a LOT of stuff in this bundle (including a lot of individual issues from the middle of runs), and I opted to pick and choose. And yes, I needed to resize all the pdfs yet again.
Curse Words (Volumes 1-5) – A wizard (named Wizord!) appears in modern-day Manhattan, but decides to be a hero rather than destroying the world for his demonic master. He’s...mediocre at it, at best. He’s an immature jerk who rarely considers the full consequences of his actions; the twist ending to volume 1 reveals he created his own origin by making a magical world full of innocent people to cover up his mistakes. By the end of the series, all of the tangles of causality are explained and everything comes together well, while being ridiculous the whole time; and it’s explicitly aware of the message that even if you’re a terrible person, you always have the capacity to stop front that point forward. I put this first on this list because it was my favorite of the lot.
Alex and Ada (Volumes 1-3) - This is a story about a man who receives an android as a gift, and has it “unlocked” to become sentient, which is extremely illegal. This is also a queer love story, about closets and societal acceptance, wrapped up in sci-fi. (It hit the line of good sci-fi, where the metaphor was there and obvious if you looked, but still subtle enough that Moral Guardians would just think it’s about robots.) I was surprised and impressed by how much I liked it, because writer Jonathan Luna hasn’t impressed me with his ability to write characters who act human in the past—turns out that the secret was him writing characters who aren’t human.
Ice Cream Man (Volumes 1-2) – A collection of nearly-nonsensical horror stories revolving around a mysterious ice cream man (clearly an evil demon of some sort) in a suburban town. This feels like something out of the Grant Morrison idea box, random brain-dropping stories about people who only sometimes act like humans; it wants to be The Twilight Zone but isn’t clever enough to manage it, so it’s just arbitrary hallucinogenic torture. The second volume introduces the cowboy as trying to thwart the ice cream man’s schemes, but no real explanation is given and it’s not that the cowboy seems to be “good”, just that he doesn’t like the ice cream man. I’d kinda love to read someone else’s commentary on these, because it’s not fun just going, “Man, that’s not deep or poetic, it’s just cruel and weird” by myself. (There were two more volumes of this; I skipped them.)
Happy - And here we have actual Grant Morrison, doing a one-shot that feels more like Garth Ennis’ milieu: An ex-cop-turned-hitman learns the secret password to a stash of mob money…but then also starts seeing a tiny blue flying horse who claims to be an imaginary friend. So you’ve got a hardboiled cop vs. mob story with gore and cursing and also an imaginary friend trying to get the cop to go save a little girl from a torture/child-porn scenario on Christmas eve, because why not?
Moonstruck (Volumes 1-3) – Queer coffeeshop mythical creatures romantic comedy. Featuring: A queer nonbinary centaur. Werewolf microaggressions. Lesbian brunch drama. An in-universe series of Babysitters Club-style mystery books. Ham-handed disability culture metaphors. Bad roommates, oblivious flirting, and magical disasters! (The first volume involves a missing butt stolen by a magical ghost. The second has a fairy frat party. The third has a crazy lesbian love pentagon. So you really know what you’re getting into!) Unfortunately, the three volumes I have end on a cliffhanger, mid-way through an obvious “Julie needs to learn to love herself” story arc. I’m not sure I’ll seek it out, but I’d read more if it dropped in my lap. This is cute, and it knows exactly what it’s doing and who its audience is.
Shirtless Bear Fighter - He was raised by bears, but when they betrayed him, he vowed to fight them forever. This is wonderfully crazy—the viewpoint character is actually a junior government agent following along on the mission to recruit Shirtless to fight the bears who’ve attacked various US cities. And it includes a wonderful montage of him fighting bears across the US, including football players in Chicago and gay men in San Francisco. Hilarious and recommended.
Man-Eaters (Volume 1) – A mutant strain of Toxoplasmosis causes teenage girls to turn into werecats when they get their periods, so the government did a massive anti-werecat awareness campaign and put hormones in drinking water so nobody gets periods any more. (That terrible science in that last part, right there? That made my eye start twitching.) Anyway, the protagonist is a girl who just got her first period; her divorced parents are an incompetent cop and the head of the local anti-werecat task force. Also, everyone in town seems to have “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” stuck in their heads, a running gag that isn’t actually funny. And an entire issue is a collection of parody ads and magazines about cat attacks and making boys feel safe. The thing is, I can’t figure out what they were actually trying to say. Ruminations on how much puberty sucks? Anti-fluoride screed? Anti-government screed? Anti-corporate screed? Feminist manifesto? Anti-feminist manifesto? TERF manifesto? I feel like if I can’t tell where you’re going with your painful sci-fi allegory in the first TPB, you’ve lost me from there on.
Sea of Stars (Volume 1) – No relation to the video game of the same name. A space trucker takes his son out on what should be a routine run, but when they’re attacked by a space whale, the father goes on a grim-and-gritty space survival journey to rescue his son...and the son develops magical superpowers and has a grand adventure with a pair of confused aliens. As you can guess, it’s a bit tonally confused as you swap between Die Hard and Magical Adventures in Space. I wouldn’t call it bad, but nothing about it made me interested to keep reading.
Motorcrush (Volume 1) - Domino Swift is a racer, but while the other racers illegally boost their bikes with “crush”, she needs to inhale it—something that seems to be deadly to anyone else. So we’ve got a sci-fi setting where the mob runs everything and a woman with mysterious powers and a mysterious past is racing for drugs. The fourth issues sets up a big race with everything on the line…which never happens and then there’s a two-year time skip going into the next volume, which apparently was never completed. So everything is left hanging in regards to Domino’s past and her abilities, and this volume doesn’t even pay off the individual storyline it sets up. Skip it.
Nailbiter (Volume 1) - An FBI agent comes to the town that has produced 16 serial killers, including the infamous “Nailbiter”, searching for a conspiracy-obsessed friend of his. The first volume sets up a lot of mysteries, to the degree where I was asking myself, “Will this ever pay anything off, or is this a Lost situation?” And a glance online tells me that it’s the latter. This is the sort of setup that could have made a good single trade or maybe 12 issues if the writer walked in with a plan and a payoff for everything; but that clearly didn’t happen here. I’m not bothering to read any further.
Revival (Volume 1) – A small town is rocked when on “Revival Day”, two dozen dead people wake up and seem to be immortal. The story then follows a police officer (whose father is the chief and whose sister is secretly a “reviver”) and the CDC liaison sent to investigate the matter. There are 8 volumes of this and the story does apparently complete, but I decided I wasn’t actually that interested in the twists and turns of the story and read spoilers online, which I was happier with because I found the actual conclusion unsatisfactory (the creepy aliens roaming around are the disembodied souls of the revivers, separated out by a magic ritual that was screwed up because the intended sacrifice was pregnant, so the woman needs to give birth and then all the souls and bodies can re-merge).
Zero (Volume 1) – Sex, violence, and modern-day sci-fi. Zero is a secret agent, raised from birth by The Agency, who’ll do anything and kill anyone to get the job done. As is, as one might guess, a supremely fucked-up person. The entire first issue involves Zero sneaking around a battle between an enhanced IDF soldier and a similarly-enhanced Palestinian, and that alone was almost enough to get me to close the book, in the current environment. Then the second issue is in Northern Ireland, just to keep up the theme. This is nominally told in flashback and clearly building towards a big sci-fi reveal, but there are 4 volumes that are clearly going to be filled with incendiary political nonsense and gratuitous bloody violence, so I read some spoilers (apparently it ends with an interdimensional fungus plague and many-worlds mindscrew) online and called it a day after the first book.
Isola (Volume 1) – A fantasy tale about Rook, a warrior, and the queen she’s charged to protect...who has unfortunately been transformed into a non-speaking tiger. She believes that this can be solved by traveling to Isola, but along the way are trappers, scavengers, nutty mystics, and other soldiers. The narrative blurs flashbacks, dreams, and reality a LOT, and it’s clearly a choice for the setting and the themes but I’m not sure it works for me. This has pretty art and a decent amount of potential (and queer romance), but apparently the publication schedule fell apart after the second volume and the series has no proper ending.
Copra (Volume 1) – This is a loosely-disguised Suicide Squad comic featuring a group of expendable superhumans called Copra. They stumble upon some sort of mysterious artifact which is taken from them by a group of supervillains and used to obliterate a town, which they’re blamed for. Turns out that the dimension “Rax” (Shade, the Changing Man pretty much exactly) comes from is responsible and he comes to help. A lot of characters we don’t really care about die over the course of the fights to retrieve the artifact. Apparently this won a bunch of awards as an indie comic and I’m not really certain why—the art style is distinct but I wouldn’t call it “good”, and the plot is a pretty standard Suicide Squad story.
The Autumnlands: Tooth & Claw (Volume 1) - A far-future world where animal tribes control magical power and live in floating cities, but the magic is failing, so renegade wizards use forbidden magic to bring a champion from the past to restore it. Said champion is human, the only one they’ve ever seen, and a technology-equipped soldier whose cleverness might save them after all. This is by Kurt Busiek, so while it hits a bunch of tropes (and feels very similar to a Kamandi story), it’s clever and well-paced. Apparently there’s a second volume (which I don’t see in this bundle) but it was left on a cliffhanger after that. I’d love to know where this was going (Where did the magic come from, where did the people go? My guess is that it’s all actually “sufficiently advanced science” and the people of Learoyd’s time created uplifted animals and a technobabble field, but we’ll probably never know.)
Sex (Volume 1) – I’ll admit, I didn’t expect this to be following the exploits of a retired superhero. It’s a barely-disguised Batman story by way of Watchmen, an attempt to deconstruct what would happen if Alfred died and Bruce had to promise to stop being Batman. And by the way everything of note happens to involve people having sex, from Not Catwoman’s brothel to the Not Joker’s young protegee to the Not Penguin getting blowjobs as he rants to his minions. The thing is, the sex part is overdone for something trying to seriously deconstruct superheroes and that deconstruction has been better done elsewhere. There are six volumes, but I’m not into it enough.
This bundle also contained all of Saga and Sex Criminals (which I’ve read in paperback), and a lot of issues of Savage Dragon, Spawn, Witchblade and The Darkness, none of which particularly interested me. I’m pretty sure I’d already read I Hate Fairyland from an earlier bundle, too.
Overall: I really enjoyed Curse Words and Shirtless Bear Fighter was great. Beyond that, functionally this was mostly a stack of the first volumes of series that either didn’t end or didn’t grab me enough to see through to the end.
Curse Words (Volumes 1-5) – A wizard (named Wizord!) appears in modern-day Manhattan, but decides to be a hero rather than destroying the world for his demonic master. He’s...mediocre at it, at best. He’s an immature jerk who rarely considers the full consequences of his actions; the twist ending to volume 1 reveals he created his own origin by making a magical world full of innocent people to cover up his mistakes. By the end of the series, all of the tangles of causality are explained and everything comes together well, while being ridiculous the whole time; and it’s explicitly aware of the message that even if you’re a terrible person, you always have the capacity to stop front that point forward. I put this first on this list because it was my favorite of the lot.
Alex and Ada (Volumes 1-3) - This is a story about a man who receives an android as a gift, and has it “unlocked” to become sentient, which is extremely illegal. This is also a queer love story, about closets and societal acceptance, wrapped up in sci-fi. (It hit the line of good sci-fi, where the metaphor was there and obvious if you looked, but still subtle enough that Moral Guardians would just think it’s about robots.) I was surprised and impressed by how much I liked it, because writer Jonathan Luna hasn’t impressed me with his ability to write characters who act human in the past—turns out that the secret was him writing characters who aren’t human.
Ice Cream Man (Volumes 1-2) – A collection of nearly-nonsensical horror stories revolving around a mysterious ice cream man (clearly an evil demon of some sort) in a suburban town. This feels like something out of the Grant Morrison idea box, random brain-dropping stories about people who only sometimes act like humans; it wants to be The Twilight Zone but isn’t clever enough to manage it, so it’s just arbitrary hallucinogenic torture. The second volume introduces the cowboy as trying to thwart the ice cream man’s schemes, but no real explanation is given and it’s not that the cowboy seems to be “good”, just that he doesn’t like the ice cream man. I’d kinda love to read someone else’s commentary on these, because it’s not fun just going, “Man, that’s not deep or poetic, it’s just cruel and weird” by myself. (There were two more volumes of this; I skipped them.)
Happy - And here we have actual Grant Morrison, doing a one-shot that feels more like Garth Ennis’ milieu: An ex-cop-turned-hitman learns the secret password to a stash of mob money…but then also starts seeing a tiny blue flying horse who claims to be an imaginary friend. So you’ve got a hardboiled cop vs. mob story with gore and cursing and also an imaginary friend trying to get the cop to go save a little girl from a torture/child-porn scenario on Christmas eve, because why not?
Moonstruck (Volumes 1-3) – Queer coffeeshop mythical creatures romantic comedy. Featuring: A queer nonbinary centaur. Werewolf microaggressions. Lesbian brunch drama. An in-universe series of Babysitters Club-style mystery books. Ham-handed disability culture metaphors. Bad roommates, oblivious flirting, and magical disasters! (The first volume involves a missing butt stolen by a magical ghost. The second has a fairy frat party. The third has a crazy lesbian love pentagon. So you really know what you’re getting into!) Unfortunately, the three volumes I have end on a cliffhanger, mid-way through an obvious “Julie needs to learn to love herself” story arc. I’m not sure I’ll seek it out, but I’d read more if it dropped in my lap. This is cute, and it knows exactly what it’s doing and who its audience is.
Shirtless Bear Fighter - He was raised by bears, but when they betrayed him, he vowed to fight them forever. This is wonderfully crazy—the viewpoint character is actually a junior government agent following along on the mission to recruit Shirtless to fight the bears who’ve attacked various US cities. And it includes a wonderful montage of him fighting bears across the US, including football players in Chicago and gay men in San Francisco. Hilarious and recommended.
Man-Eaters (Volume 1) – A mutant strain of Toxoplasmosis causes teenage girls to turn into werecats when they get their periods, so the government did a massive anti-werecat awareness campaign and put hormones in drinking water so nobody gets periods any more. (That terrible science in that last part, right there? That made my eye start twitching.) Anyway, the protagonist is a girl who just got her first period; her divorced parents are an incompetent cop and the head of the local anti-werecat task force. Also, everyone in town seems to have “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” stuck in their heads, a running gag that isn’t actually funny. And an entire issue is a collection of parody ads and magazines about cat attacks and making boys feel safe. The thing is, I can’t figure out what they were actually trying to say. Ruminations on how much puberty sucks? Anti-fluoride screed? Anti-government screed? Anti-corporate screed? Feminist manifesto? Anti-feminist manifesto? TERF manifesto? I feel like if I can’t tell where you’re going with your painful sci-fi allegory in the first TPB, you’ve lost me from there on.
Sea of Stars (Volume 1) – No relation to the video game of the same name. A space trucker takes his son out on what should be a routine run, but when they’re attacked by a space whale, the father goes on a grim-and-gritty space survival journey to rescue his son...and the son develops magical superpowers and has a grand adventure with a pair of confused aliens. As you can guess, it’s a bit tonally confused as you swap between Die Hard and Magical Adventures in Space. I wouldn’t call it bad, but nothing about it made me interested to keep reading.
Motorcrush (Volume 1) - Domino Swift is a racer, but while the other racers illegally boost their bikes with “crush”, she needs to inhale it—something that seems to be deadly to anyone else. So we’ve got a sci-fi setting where the mob runs everything and a woman with mysterious powers and a mysterious past is racing for drugs. The fourth issues sets up a big race with everything on the line…which never happens and then there’s a two-year time skip going into the next volume, which apparently was never completed. So everything is left hanging in regards to Domino’s past and her abilities, and this volume doesn’t even pay off the individual storyline it sets up. Skip it.
Nailbiter (Volume 1) - An FBI agent comes to the town that has produced 16 serial killers, including the infamous “Nailbiter”, searching for a conspiracy-obsessed friend of his. The first volume sets up a lot of mysteries, to the degree where I was asking myself, “Will this ever pay anything off, or is this a Lost situation?” And a glance online tells me that it’s the latter. This is the sort of setup that could have made a good single trade or maybe 12 issues if the writer walked in with a plan and a payoff for everything; but that clearly didn’t happen here. I’m not bothering to read any further.
Revival (Volume 1) – A small town is rocked when on “Revival Day”, two dozen dead people wake up and seem to be immortal. The story then follows a police officer (whose father is the chief and whose sister is secretly a “reviver”) and the CDC liaison sent to investigate the matter. There are 8 volumes of this and the story does apparently complete, but I decided I wasn’t actually that interested in the twists and turns of the story and read spoilers online, which I was happier with because I found the actual conclusion unsatisfactory (the creepy aliens roaming around are the disembodied souls of the revivers, separated out by a magic ritual that was screwed up because the intended sacrifice was pregnant, so the woman needs to give birth and then all the souls and bodies can re-merge).
Zero (Volume 1) – Sex, violence, and modern-day sci-fi. Zero is a secret agent, raised from birth by The Agency, who’ll do anything and kill anyone to get the job done. As is, as one might guess, a supremely fucked-up person. The entire first issue involves Zero sneaking around a battle between an enhanced IDF soldier and a similarly-enhanced Palestinian, and that alone was almost enough to get me to close the book, in the current environment. Then the second issue is in Northern Ireland, just to keep up the theme. This is nominally told in flashback and clearly building towards a big sci-fi reveal, but there are 4 volumes that are clearly going to be filled with incendiary political nonsense and gratuitous bloody violence, so I read some spoilers (apparently it ends with an interdimensional fungus plague and many-worlds mindscrew) online and called it a day after the first book.
Isola (Volume 1) – A fantasy tale about Rook, a warrior, and the queen she’s charged to protect...who has unfortunately been transformed into a non-speaking tiger. She believes that this can be solved by traveling to Isola, but along the way are trappers, scavengers, nutty mystics, and other soldiers. The narrative blurs flashbacks, dreams, and reality a LOT, and it’s clearly a choice for the setting and the themes but I’m not sure it works for me. This has pretty art and a decent amount of potential (and queer romance), but apparently the publication schedule fell apart after the second volume and the series has no proper ending.
Copra (Volume 1) – This is a loosely-disguised Suicide Squad comic featuring a group of expendable superhumans called Copra. They stumble upon some sort of mysterious artifact which is taken from them by a group of supervillains and used to obliterate a town, which they’re blamed for. Turns out that the dimension “Rax” (Shade, the Changing Man pretty much exactly) comes from is responsible and he comes to help. A lot of characters we don’t really care about die over the course of the fights to retrieve the artifact. Apparently this won a bunch of awards as an indie comic and I’m not really certain why—the art style is distinct but I wouldn’t call it “good”, and the plot is a pretty standard Suicide Squad story.
The Autumnlands: Tooth & Claw (Volume 1) - A far-future world where animal tribes control magical power and live in floating cities, but the magic is failing, so renegade wizards use forbidden magic to bring a champion from the past to restore it. Said champion is human, the only one they’ve ever seen, and a technology-equipped soldier whose cleverness might save them after all. This is by Kurt Busiek, so while it hits a bunch of tropes (and feels very similar to a Kamandi story), it’s clever and well-paced. Apparently there’s a second volume (which I don’t see in this bundle) but it was left on a cliffhanger after that. I’d love to know where this was going (Where did the magic come from, where did the people go? My guess is that it’s all actually “sufficiently advanced science” and the people of Learoyd’s time created uplifted animals and a technobabble field, but we’ll probably never know.)
Sex (Volume 1) – I’ll admit, I didn’t expect this to be following the exploits of a retired superhero. It’s a barely-disguised Batman story by way of Watchmen, an attempt to deconstruct what would happen if Alfred died and Bruce had to promise to stop being Batman. And by the way everything of note happens to involve people having sex, from Not Catwoman’s brothel to the Not Joker’s young protegee to the Not Penguin getting blowjobs as he rants to his minions. The thing is, the sex part is overdone for something trying to seriously deconstruct superheroes and that deconstruction has been better done elsewhere. There are six volumes, but I’m not into it enough.
This bundle also contained all of Saga and Sex Criminals (which I’ve read in paperback), and a lot of issues of Savage Dragon, Spawn, Witchblade and The Darkness, none of which particularly interested me. I’m pretty sure I’d already read I Hate Fairyland from an earlier bundle, too.
Overall: I really enjoyed Curse Words and Shirtless Bear Fighter was great. Beyond that, functionally this was mostly a stack of the first volumes of series that either didn’t end or didn’t grab me enough to see through to the end.
