The World of Insufficient Light

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.

Queen 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.”

I backed a Kickstarter for a bunch of webcomic collections, and also bought ARR a stack of comic strip collections because he’s read everything on the shelves. Then I read them all.

Nancy Wins At Friendship – I loved the original Bushmiller years of Nancy, which I have collected in a series of reprint books. They’re very much a product of their time, but they’re clever and funny. Olivia Jaimes found that voice, making the events modern (smartphones, social media, robotics club) but keeping the character appropriately timeless, and mixing fourth-wall-breaking gags with character-based ones. Also, expanding the cast of Nancy’s peers beyond Sluggo creates more variety in the “kids being silly” gags.

Zits (four volumes) - On one hand, there are only like a half-dozen jokes: Jeremy eats a lot, Jeremy’s feet are big, Jeremy doesn’t listen to his parents/girlfriend, Jeremy can’t communicate with his parents/girlfriend, the van is a shitshow, Pierce is weird. On the other hand, they’ve kept the art high-quality over the years and have come up with a lot of variations on those jokes, often worth a chuckle or two.

Scenes from a Multiverse (books 1 – 5) – Jon Rosenberg is a very good comic creator and a lousy businessman, something I realized when I interviewed him in 2002. Since his continuity-heavy Goats series ran out of steam and he never finished it, he’s been running this gag-a-day strip with moderate continuity, which is much more evident when you read them all in a row. There will be a sequence of events with a single character that take place moments apart, but were published over the course of four months with a half dozen other strips between each one. And every individual strip is funny, but boy it would be easier to keep track of what was going on if they were actually in sequence together...which he generally did NOT do for the books. (He also has a limited collection of jokes, many of them revolving around religion being stupid, but they only get old if you read them all in a row.)

I really should re-read Goats at some point too, as I have the full set in both physical and pdf form. Well, sort of--there are actually two sets of Goats books: There are six “Goats Silver” books that collect the black-and-white, more gag-a-day strips of the earlier years, and then four books of the multiverse-spanning “Infinite Pendergast Cycle”. I’ll get there eventually.

Humanoids is a European publisher, and The Incal and Twilight Man are two of their most popular titles, though I’ll admit I don’t really understand why. (I read The Incal in an earlier bundle and, seriously, it’s the most 70s I think science fiction can get. And that’s not a compliment.) Anyway, here’s some of their other output:

In Vitro – The story of one man’s struggle with his infertility as he and his wife tried to have children; and along the way, a look back on his relationship with his own father. Honestly, though, it feels unfinished: The last panel indicates they were eventually successful, but the story itself doesn’t carry to or through that resolution and also leaves off on the question of whether he ever meets up with his father again. It’s kind of frustratingly disappointing, really, because the pacing was good until it suddenly wasn’t.

Dog Days – A French man takes his two sons and his dog to a small beach town he had visited as a child. The dog runs away and (warning!) the man finds him dead; but he doesn’t tell his sons and ends up learning that there’s a whole string of missing dogs. But in case you thought he’d solve a mystery or something: NOPE. It’s all just a bunch of faffing about. His wife never arrives, he sleeps with an old friend, he tries to retrieve the dead dog but gets caught, and a bunch of hunters who think he’s the dog-poisoner beat him up. Then he goes home. No real arc and nothing actually resolves. This is, as the saying goes, a shaggy dog story.

Chasing Echoes – A story about a family of American Jews descended from Holocaust survivors…being jerks to each other the way only American Jews can be. (I have to keep a mapping of which of my aunts are speaking to each other; I can’t criticize.) They go on a big family reunion trip to Poland to try to hunt down their heritage (and the family mill that the Nazis took their grandparents from). On one hand, though this does have a proper arc and character development, it’s also a wandering muddle of a story that sets up plenty of things it doesn’t really know how to pay off. On the other hand, it’s very much For Me. If this description sounds like nonsense you might get from your own relatives, it might be for you too.

Fraternity - Childhood best friends reunite at college, but one of them joins a fraternity that’s actually a demon-possessed cult, which means the other needs to learn a lot about demon-hunting really fast. This has a decent setup but doesn’t actually use it well enough— too much time is spent setting up the family tragedy and the maybe-girlfriend for too little payoff; the cult itself is under-developed in favor is splash horror scenes and the cops basically arrive out of nowhere in the ending. It feels like a bunch of their original ideas weren’t working but they didn’t actually want to drop anything, so they just patched it all back together and called it good enough.

Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces – A story about a caregiver and her Alzheimer’s patient. It’s poetic, and clearly intended to call attention to the shortcomings of the French elder care system. My takeaway is that the French system of elder care is clearly underfunded and undermaintained...but comparing it against the American system? I mean, at least they’re trying!

Luisa: Now and Then – 30-something Luisa is living in Paris and is generally unhappy with her life. Then 15-year-old Luisa falls asleep on a bus and finds herself in Paris, and through the generosity of a stranger ends up face-to-face with her future self. Adult Luisa is honestly really an aggressive ass through this discovery period, and generally a jerk to her younger self throughout. Like, neither compassion nor self-awareness at all. I suspect this is a metaphor but it didn’t endear me to the character. This features flashbacks to the egregiously homophobic 90s, because Luisa is queer but severely repressed about it. Then things get even more complicated as the older and younger versions of Luisa start swapping traits, which is again clearly a metaphor—older Luisa needs to learn which parts of her younger self to reclaim and which to let go in order to move on with her life. And the stinger has younger Luisa getting home in an “it was all a dream for her” sort of way, though it’s entertaining to think she then builds an alternate future with the self-knowledge she gained.

Retroactive - Time travel shenanigans! We follow a US government agent who uses the government’s time-travel system to keep history on track, but “anomalies” are popping up in the time stream that they can’t figure out. And it involves the main character getting trapped in a time loop, and I love time loops. Though this leaves a rather large plot hole (Where do the advanced, untraceable time suits come from, given the sequence of events?), it’s a neat standalone plot and it works.

Swine - Jesus cast the swarm of demons named Legion into a herd of pigs and ran them off a cliff…but some of them survived! This is an action-thriller comic and it’s just absurd enough to be entertaining, as the ex-husband and younger sister of a visionary preacher go after the demon pigs who killed her, eventually joined by a tinfoil-hat-wearing renegade demon pig who doesn’t want to rejoin his brethren. And it’s revealed that the demon pigs have been a source of humanity’s ills for the intervening millennia: They sank the Titanic and cause the Hindenburg explosion, among other things!

Asphalt Blues – Our protagonist is Mickey, a middle-aged man who drives too fast and tries to avoid connections, in a near-future sci-fi world. His girlfriend Nina dumps him for his inability to commit, then we jump forward 13 years. Micky’s wife has just been severely injured in a car crash, Nina’s husband is liaison between the corrupt government and the power company that’s faking clean energy. Everyone is unhappy, everyone is cheating. Then Mickey blows up the power plant and Nina’s boyfriend gets arrested for reckless driving. Eight months later, everybody’s happier with their lives and get what they wanted. This is a ramble of a story that doesn’t really know what it’s saying. The most standout thing is the “lineless” art style.

Bramble (Volume 1) – I do not have a goddamn clue what’s going on here. A mute giant who apparently worships some kind of forest deity comes to the big city, hallucinates, and murders a bunch of people. A useless put-upon nebbish of a police detective tracks him down. The asshole bully cops get murdered by the giant. A mysterious cult calls the giant their messiah. Nobody is likable, there is deeply insufficient exposition, and I can’t bring myself to care what the story is. (And I skipped the other two volumes of this.)

Chronophage - Then we hit another good one: A single mom working two dead-end jobs meets a strange man at a bar, and suddenly her life seems to start getting better. It turns out that he’s been “eating” the bad moments of her life both to sustain himself and in a paternalistic (and selfish) desire to make her life better. But his idea of improving her life doesn’t match hers, and she figures out that though he’s moving through time differently, he’s still subject to causality. This is solid sci-fi that knows what it’s doing and pulls it off.

Tiki: A Very Ruff Year - An autobiographical story. During the pandemic lockdowns, a man buys a dog for his wife and daughter, but it turns out that Tiki the dog is just enough to destroy his already-fragile mental health and he has a complete breakdown. If you want to see a Frenchman have an anxiety spiral over an adorable puppy (and also unemployment, isolation, the pandemic, and unresolved family trauma), then this is for you. No dogs are harmed—Tiki ends up happy in a new home at the end. And the protagonist recovers and writes a graphic novel.

Ignited (Volume 1) – Survivors of a school shooting get superpowers. A power fantasy for our time, as conspiracy theorists and second amendment crusaders respond to the school shooting by bringing in more guns and the traumatized superpowered teenagers take them down. Though they’re doing okay at the end of this volume, it’s pretty clear they’re going to get in all sorts of deep shit in the continuing series. (This is in the same universe as OMNI, which I read some of in an earlier bundle, and Strangelands, which wasn’t included.)

Olympus (Volumes 1-2) – A group of archeology students find a mysterious urn when diving off the coast of Greece, and are attacked by criminals and shipwrecked during a sudden storm, which drops them on an island full of mythological beasts. The two volumes make one complete story, a quest to climb Olympus and re-seal Pandora’s Box. It’s a cute little action movie of a comic; Hollywood-ish and forgettable.

Exo (Volumes 1-3) – Humanity has figured out that life likely exists on an exoplanet dubbed “Darwin II”, but aliens have already arrived on Earth; they attacked a space station on their way in and have taken over several human bodies in an effort to hijack a NASA scientist’s work. While the aliens on Earth are being chased down by NASA, a military force has been sent to the moon to hunt down the aliens’ staging base. It turns out to be a massive misunderstanding: Humanity’s evolution was sparked by an alien virus delivered via comet, and the aliens believe that virus to be deadly to them and are trying to set off an EMP to destroy Earth’s technology before the space program expands. But the virus has mutated and is harmless to them—and once that’s all cleared up, humanity can make a proper first contact. This is another action movie comic; the three volumes tell a complete story but it doesn’t hold together as well as some of the others. (Too many disparate pieces that could have used a better editing pass.)

Thick Skins - Another sci-fi action movie one-shot adventure; this one taking place across spacefaring planets and revolving around a missing tribe of modified humans called “thick skins,” who both the protagonist and a bunch of other assholes have been hired to find. (“Shocking” twists: The protagonist is secretly one of them, the evil corporation is trying to have them exterminated because they witnessed a dirty secret, and the woman was evil the whole time.) The artist seems to have trouble keeping track of who he’s drawing from panel to panel—body and head shapes change wildly and the characters manage to all look alike without looking consistently like themselves.

Retina (Volumes 1-3) – I’ll admit, while this wasn’t my favorite of the sci-fi thrillers, I’m really appreciating that they’re including full stories in the bundle. Like Exo, each volume of this was only 50 pages, so the trio makes a full trade. This follows a cop in 2050 when he’s presented with a mystery corpse whose eyes identify her as two different women, with the twist that she’s an ultra-secret undercover agent (and not really dead), and her handlers are a pair of bumbling idiots (and their superior doesn’t seem to understand that he can just tell the cops to drop the case). This was meh; it spends too much time with cops chasing a synthetic heroin deal at stupid cross-purposes with each other, and far too little actually working with the sci-fi premise.

Count - And one more sci-fi action movie. Redxan is a commoner who worked his way up to success, until his brother-in-law betrayed him and got him sent to prison for 13 years for a crime he didn’t commit; and during that time the betrayer took over the government and everyone Redxan loved died. Fortunately, a fellow prisoner gives Redxan the location of a helpful robot, a magic sword, and a large fortune in credits, so that when he escapes he can pursue his revenge. This is a fantasy story “reskinned” as sci-fi—the technology might as well be magic, and the “protectorate” is just a kingdom run by inherited nobility—and it’s not bad but it’s entirely forgettable.

Thousand Faces (Volume 1) - A British doctor ends up on the American frontier, and is taken in by the Sioux when he rescues their chief, but there’s some kind of demon chasing him and apparently possessing the animals of the plains. How much magic is there? How the hell does this guy survive all the nonsense he goes through? What’s the connection between the doctor who understood hygiene enough to actually save patients and the demons chasing the protagonist? Why do I care? There were five volumes of this; I wasn’t pulled in enough to continue.

The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television - A biography comic of Rod Serling, tacking his time in the military as a WW2 paratrooper, his early television hits, The Twilight Zone, and the years after. It’s pretty decent, and doesn’t really pull punches with regards to both the crap Serling went through and the less-than-ideal choices he made out of ego. It also makes we want to rewatch some original Twilight Zone episodes.

Lugosi: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Dracula – By the same author and with a similar style. Young Bela Lugosi was a charming scoundrel who got driven out of Hungary when the communist takeover there failed, and made it big in America (and with a lot of American women). He made a lot of lousy choices; he really led the “Hollywood tabloid divorce” trend, including a 4-day marriage to a rich socialite. And like many actors, he never let the truth get in a way of a good story, which the book does a decent job of making clear by contrasting the narration with Lugosi’s own claims. The later years of his career weren’t kind to him, marked by cheesy roles and drug addiction, but Ed Wood really comes off well in this.

Versailles: My Father’s Palace - The story of Pierre de Nolhac, the curator of the Palace of Versailles between 1892 and 1920, as told by his son Henri. It intersperses the personal details of de Nolhac’s family with the work of restoring the palace amid political struggles and then World War One. This was another of the interesting biographies, especially as I came into it knowing virtually nothing about the subject.

Hedy Lamarr: An Incredible Life - Lamarr did in fact live an incredible life, but this is a problematically-paced recounting of it that can’t seem to decide how “scandalous” it wants to be. It blazes through events and leaves out details everywhere; and spends far too much dialogue on the size of Lamarr’s breasts. (The second-to-last segment is a huckster recounting various headlines and scandals with no actual commentary on the truth behind them—I’m wondering if the author got bored of doing research at that point and just dumped a headline summary into his notes.)

I Am Legion - This takes a very different tack from Swine while referencing the same biblical passage: A blood-borne, body-hopping demon is maneuvering through the ranks of both sides of WW2, trying to stop a second such demon in the body of a little girl. (Turns out, the demon is Dracula, but he’s nominally the good guy because he’s given up on power in favor of security and is just upset the second demon is revealing them to the world.) This was a decent spy thriller, but there were too many damn characters without enough distinction to them, and by the end I couldn’t track which bodies Vlad had been in, who was and wasn’t controlled, and what the exact order of events was.

Miss: Better Living Through Crime (Volume 1) - The first of four volumes that revolve around a white woman and the black man she recruits as an accomplice on the mean streets of Harlem in the Roaring 20s. You see, she has a terrible, tragic backstory and everyone just uses her, so she gets very good at murder very quickly (but still has a heart of gold). Honestly, this is just a little too wacky to work as a serious crime comic (the series of increasingly improbably events as Slim escapes from the mobsters trying to kill him) but too dark to work as a farce. Also, it’s got a spotlight on American racism and sexism but is written by a European white man, which means everything feels vaguely like a caricature—and is still incredibly racist and sexist, just in a slightly different way.

River of Ink – Nominally answering a child’s question “Why do we draw?” this is a scattershot “history of art and also my family” that’s trying to make a poetic sort of artwork and is most succeeding at being up its own ass. (Also, comically worshipful of French artists and blatantly wrong in several statements it makes about religion.) There’s a bonus section with the artist and his favorite American influence, Scott McCloud…which, yeah, should have guessed that.

The Fires of Theseus (Volumes 1-2) – The “true story” of Theseus and the minotaur. In this version, Theseus is the discarded daughter of King Aegeus. She’s sold as a prostitute, and when she rejects that sent to fight in an arena. She eventually kills the slave master, escapes, and becomes the most feared bandit leader in Greece. When she hears Athens fell to King Minos’ minotaur, she goes to investigate, but is captured and sent as a sacrifice to it. There, she meets Ariadne and learns that the minotaur is her disabled (but entirely human) brother, used as a weapon by his father. Through trickery and guile, all the kings end up dead, Ariadne gets to rule Crete, and Theseus and the Minotaur live happily ever after. All that said…this is only a feminist story in the broadest strokes; among other things, Theseus spends a LOT of time naked for the viewer’s appreciation.

Wings of Light (Volume 1) is an adaptation of a Julia Verlanger Retroworlds story, and honestly I’ve never managed to get into those. So is Orion’s Outcasts (Volume 1), and that opened with the main character being branded a criminal by a false rape accusation, which made me even less interested. I skimmed Pandemonium (Volume 1) and Red Hand: Twilight of the Gods (Volume 1) and neither particularly grabbed me. I had downloaded Alice on the Run: One Child’s Journey Through the Rwandan Civil War, but then decided that it just wasn’t something I needed to read. And this was hardly everything in the bundle, but there were a bunch of series that I’ve either tried in other bundles or could tell right off the bat that I wasn’t interested in.

Overall: Chasing Echoes was For Me. Luisa: Now and Then was interesting, even if the execution wasn’t perfectly to my taste. Retroactive and Chronophage were clever sci-fi stories that worked well and had good art. The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television was probably my favorite of the biography comics. And Swine was a special kind of batshit that I had to respect.

Annoyingly, 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.

When we went up to Uticon in 2022, Xannoside was cleaning out his comic collection and gave us three big boxes of trades to sell. We sold two of them, but I sorted out a full box’s worth of comics I wanted to read and possibly keep. I read a pile of them in fall of 2022 (along with a miniseries I picked up at Uticon) but never actually wrote out the reviews because I got distracted to reading other things.

Books read in 2022:
Slapstick (Issues #1-6) – I thought I was buying a full set of the original mini, but this was actually a reboot / sequel to the original miniseries that changed around a few of the rules of Slapstick’s cartoony powers but remained entertaining in a strict niche sort of way.

The Sentry – One of Marvel’s many overpowered Superman take-offs, this one is insane and hallucinates his evil archnemesis who may or may not be his split personality.

Dynamo 5 (volumes 1-2) – The five illegitimate children of a Superman-type each have inherited one major power and the Lois Lane character becomes their handler as a super-team against various threats. Cute idea, middling execution, fun read.

Supreme Power (volumes 1-3) I actually already own in hardcover and was just re-reading, though they lead into Supreme Power: Hyperion and Squadron Supreme (volume 1) which are interesting but honestly kind of water down the world-shaking setup of the first few volumes.

Ms. Marvel (volumes 1-3) – The Carol Danvers edition of “Ms. Marvel”, and they clearly didn't really know what to do with her.

There was a random volume of Gen-13 that seemed really familiar, to the point I’m 90% certain I have a copy in the stacks somewhere. It was four unconnected stories.

Alias (volumes 1-4) – The original set of stories of Jessica Jones that was built into the Netflix series. It’s very different from the TV show, stronger in some ways but weaker in others, and still very good. This was one of the few things from the box I decided to keep for my collection after reading.

Then, we have the stack I’ve read more recently:

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Overall: It’s nice to actually read an era of Marvel books I hadn’t before and re-read a bunch of bits and pieces of other 90s material, but I can see why Xannoside was ready to let the collection go.

Direct Conversations by Paul Kupperberg – With the appropriate disclaimers that my dad is one of the interviewees and he’s known “Kupps” since before I was born. This is less “interviews” and more reminiscing, because Kupperberg’s own stories get interwoven into the chapters. It felt like being at a series of comic con panels where the topic was specifically how they broke into the comic business and the arcs of their careers, focusing on the “Bronze Age” of the 70s and 80s. I already knew a bunch of the stories (either the originals, or them from different perspectives), but there were plenty I didn’t. I was also entertained that the last two interviews were with Tony Isabella, who is very clearly bitter about his treatment at DC during those years; and Mike Uslan, who jumped ship from comics to movies very early and is very cheerful about that.

Direct Comments by Paul Kupperberg – An earlier book that was available as a bonus with the Direct Conversations Kickstarter, this collects transcripts of a series of earlier interviews Kupperberg did for DC’s Direct Currents columns (1989-1991), generally written up as essays. The Julie Schwartz chapter is the best, though anyone familiar with Julie’s storytelling ability (and accomplishments!) should not be surprised. Honestly, they get pretty repetitive, because everyone told their life story about being a comics fan as a kid, and how they met their heroes and got into the business. I actually found the really old guys (who had somewhat different stories) and the “what I’m doing right now” bits to be most interesting, because it’s a snapshot circa 1990, right around the time I was getting into superhero comics. Both books are fun for DC comics fans of my generation (or older), but if you aren’t coming in with interest and knowledge of the Silver and Bronze ages of comics and the big-name creators, you’re not going to care.

Gamemaster Classified by Howard Phillips and Matthew Taranto - Howard Phillips was Nintendo’s official “Gamemaster” in the 80s and many of us early Nintendo Power readers knew him (and his iconic bowtie) from the Howard & Nester comics. This Kickstarter-funded book was his memoir of that era, though it’s mostly discussing the games that were coming out and the reviews he gave them—the personal anecdotes are actually fewer and farther between than you might imagine. There are a bunch of fun stories and some cute comic strips, but it all stays pretty light and it gets repetitive in a bunch of places. I would have preferred fewer comments on why Mother didn’t get localized (a topic covered in much more depth elsewhere) or why he loves Super Mario Brothers (we all do); and more details on the day-to-day life of a “Gamemaster”, the making of Nintendo Power, the various publicity tours, and similar things that he mentions happening but doesn’t actually go into depth about. Fun for the classic Nintendo Power fanboys, but not a lot of revelations here.

Ask Iwata by Satoru Iwata - I received this as part of an Ixo-Box, and it’s a lightly edited (and translated) collection of blog posts by the late Satoru Iwata, who was president of HAL Laboratories and later President of Nintendo, and whose accomplishments include overseeing the creation of Kirby, Smash Bros, the Wii, and the DS. A lot of it is decent, if fairly generic, management advice; and there are a bunch of fun insider Nintendo bits. The book is rounded out with memories from a few other Nintendo luminaries he worked with; he seems like a smart guy and a decent boss. Again, nothing to go out of your way for, but an interesting curiosity for the Nintendo fan. (Though it did make me think about Super Power, Spoony Bards and Silverware and how it railed at the SNES for basically just being a fancier NES; and the contrast with Iwata’s era at Nintendo trying to do things radically different from what came before.)

Bea Wolf by Zack Weinersmith – A retelling of Beowulf in a similar style to the original, only starring kids, a treehouse, and a grumpy old man. It’s very cute and very clever (especially if you’re familiar with the original), and it only covers the first third of the original, through the battle with Grendel; where most modern retellings ignore the building of the hall and the side-stories and try to cram in Grendel, Grendel’s mom and the Dragon all into one mess. (I appreciated them including the bit where Bea Wulf defeats nine krakens as kind of a footnote in a story about a swimming contest.) And ARR enjoyed it too, which means it works as a kids book.

The Ninja Turtles started life as comic book characters, in a parody of dark and gritty superhero comics of the time. (Particularly Daredevil—in certain canons, the ooze that mutated the turtles is the same that blinded Murdock. And there’s the master named Stick/Splinter and the fight against the Hand/Foot. But I digress.) But they rose to popularity as cartoon characters and were established to be a property aimed entirely at children. So Archie Comics got the license to chronicle their further comic-book adventures.

In 1989 I was eight years old, and squarely in the demographic for these guys. I was also already a big comic fan and making weekly trips to the comics shop on top of all the free DC books my dad brought home. So I have a fairly complete collection of these. And I'm going to review and summarize the entire series.

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Upon reflection, though the series was excellent at presenting recaps and flashbacks in case you missed a few issues, this was insanely continuity-heavy for a comic aimed at kids in the late 80s/early 90s; and clearly by 1992 the higher-ups at Archie weren’t paying any attention to what they were publishing. At the time, I thought that bringing back the eyes of Sarnath plotline four years later was brilliance; but I was a comic-collector child and re-read my old books constantly. I have to wonder how many kids had either picked up the series later or just had forgotten they’d ever read the older stories. Four years for the adult Spider-Man audience is nothing, but four years when it’s a third of your life so far?

There were a lot of clever ideas in the series, and they did a lot more with the “buy more toys” characters than I remember the TV show managing. The attempts to add cultural depth were clunky (I’m pretty sure the portrayals of Japan, Tibet, Israel, native American cultures, etc wouldn’t fly today), but it was a pre-internet era and they get credit for trying. The arc resolutions were very hit-or-miss; Clarrain was great at leaving every issue on a cliffhanger but had some real issues with pacing his climaxes and denouement. I remember this series fondly and the parts that stuck out to me as a kid seem to hold up.

The biggest problem with this bundle is that the majority of the books are giant high-res files to do justice to the beautiful art and coloring…but that means my ReMarkable often won’t even load them and can’t display them well if it does. Ah, well, they’re still good reads on a screen.

The delight of this bundle was the works of Stjepan Sejic and Linda Sejic; some of which I was re-reading and some of which were new to me. I already owned all 7 volumes of Sunstone. It’s a lesbian meet-cute and extended romance that gets deep into the world of BDSM. Recommended to anyone who likes kinky/sexy comics.

I had also read Blood Stain years ago. It’s about a cute and lovable dork who becomes a mad scientist’s new assistant, where hilarity ensues.

Punderworld (volume 1) is a delightfully cute retelling of the Hades/Persephone myth, making it very much a love story between adorable dorks.

Fine Print (volume 1) takes place in the same universe, but it is very much an adults-only comic, as it revolves around the modern-day descendent of Eros (Succubi, Incubi and Cupids) and their romantic entanglements with each other and assorted chosen mortals.

Swing (volumes 1-4) left me irked that apparently volume 5 is the conclusion of the series, but that isn’t in this bundle (because it isn’t finished yet). But besides that, it’s the swingers version of Sunstone, following a middle-aged couple as they spice up their marriage with swinging. The couple is a pair of adorable dorks, in case you didn’t have a solid idea of what kind of characters the Sejics write.

I read the original Rising Stars back in 2016 as part of a slate of “realistic” Superman stories, and upon re-read it’s clearer that this was always more of a thought experiment than a character-based narrative. The story is told in a few major chapters: The 100+ kids growing into adults of varying power levels and the murder-mystery that drives that plot; the 100 remaining powered-up superhumans fighting a civil war in Chicago; the 30-someodd godlike superhumans changing the world; and the superhumans disappearing underground while one of them runs for President and the story runs its course. These only vaguely run together and involve big time-skips, and honestly the characters are barely continuous between them (characters critical to later chapters sometimes don’t appear in the early ones at all), but that’s okay, because really this is an excuse for JMS to explore a bunch of situations where superhumans actually change the world’s status quo. I disagree with some of what he comes up with (despite agreeing with 90% of his politics), but I appreciate the attempts.

Rising Stars: Bright (Issues #1-3) is a miniseries about Matthew Bright following his dreams and becoming a superpowered cop. Rising Stars: Voices of the Dead (Issues #1-6) is wildly uneven, as it follows Lionel, the special who can talk to ghosts, and explores his powers; but goes off the rails into an unclear musing on the nature of death in this universe, and then breaks the rules established by the original series by allowing the government to clone his powers without any influence from the Pederson Flash. Rising Stars: Untouchable (Issues #1-5) is a retrospective on the life of Laurel, the special who used her ability to telekinetically affect very small objects to become the perfect assassin. It’s not bad, but like Bright, it’s unnecessary.

The Freeze (issues #1-4) - An interesting setup, where every person in the world “freezes” into some sort of stasis, except for one man. He (and only he) can “unfreeze” people by touching them, so he carefully unfreezes a hundred-someodd people to manage a small society. The thing is, this is all explained as a flashback as this man rescues a specific frozen woman and a mysterious army tries to kill them both…and we’ve only got 4 issues, so we don’t get the full backstory. If the first TPB appears in a later bundle, I’d be eager to read the rest of the setup and decide if an ongoing series feels worthwhile.

The Clock (issues #1-4) - A miniseries contemplating an outbreak of a “viral cancer” that followers the main researcher and turns into a political spy thriller before the four issues are up. “Half the world’s population might die but it turns out to all be an evil plot” lands differently nowadays.

Eclipse – Ten years after a solar flare destroyed most of humanity, civilization has recovered by living at night and underground, because sunlight will now instantly incinerate anyone it touches. But a mysterious killer seems to be immune to the sun and is using it as a way to murder his victims. (The science here is…problematic. If the morning sun can char people in seconds, there isn’t going to be any surviving plant life, and it’ll wreak havoc on things like algae, sea temperatures and the like. Also, nobody’s going to spontaneously become immune to that.) Issues #1-16--the entire series--were included in the bundle; but after two issues it hadn’t won me.

Infinite Dark (issues #1-8) - Thousands of years after Earth’s destruction, the universe descends into entropy and the only thing remaining in existence is a space station in a “pseudoreality field.” with the last 2,000 people on board. The first four issues deal with a conspiracy to let the station fall into entropy, ending with a last-ditch attempt to save it. The second set feel like a sequel, dragging out the same concerns and issues with a variation on the previous disaster, finally ending with a reveal of whether entropy had won or humanity had made it through to the other side. Interesting concept overall, decent sci-fi, but middling execution and the second volume was unnecessary.

Stairway - In the near future, a billionaire discovers a secret code is embedded in human DNA and that combining the 666 rare pieces of it will build a giant cubic machine that will do…something! Most of the book revolves around his unethical choices to gather the DNA fragments and get the machine built, with the lesson apparently being, “You can’t enlighten humanity without a little indiscriminate murder and child abuse.” This is another self-contained story where the sci-fi concept isn’t bad but the execution is lacking.

A Man Among Ye (Issues #1-8) – Anne Bonney and Calico Jack Rackham are pirates terrorizing the Caribbean, but Rackham’s crew isn’t happy with a woman on board. A tumultuous series of events leads to Bonney forming her own crew of women who aren’t happy with the status quo. The pacing is a bit wonky (I’m guessing they didn’t know how many issues they were actually getting) and it’s pretty standard pirate adventure fare. Not bad, but nothing standout.

Madame Mirage (Issues #1-6) – The superheroic age is over, with heroes imprisoned and villains gone underground and into organized crime. But the villains are still out there, and a mysterious woman with disguise and illusion powers is on their trail, clearly looking for vengeance. Paul Dini wrote this one (and his love of Zatanna bleeds through despite the characters being unrelated), and it holds together pretty well as a single story.

Golgotha (Volume 1) - A soldier who does terrible things to get the job done is shipped off on an 80-year cryosleep journey to Earth’s first colony on another planet, but when he arrives, newer and faster ships have beaten him there and already established a colony and have no need for soldiers…or perhaps they do, because evidence of aliens has arisen and it must be contained. Despite some brief asides into violence (because the barbarians from the past is always better at violence) this devolves quickly into “humanity needs to accept that we aren’t special in order to survive.” In a discussion of philosophy on the colony of the future, Ayn Rand and objectivism are namechecked by the semi-villain, but for a work that’s clearly trying to be a philosophical discussion, it doesn’t actually manage to do anything with that. The aliens prove their points with what appears to be telepathic mind control and volume 2 could just as easily be from the point of view of the other colonies fighting an alien menace. Not recommended!

Symmetry (Issues #1-8) – The intro page of text tells you exactly what you’re getting here: In the future, a computer hive-mind links all humans, no-one has emotions any more, there’s no diversity or creativity. The children are raised by robots and choose their name and gender at age 13. Blah blah blah liberalism-gone-wild dystopia that only rugged individuality can defeat. (But with a side of “segregation is bad” so it can be nuanced.) Hawkins thinks he’s more clever than he is.

A complete set of Cyberforce comics (including Cyberforce: Tin Men of War and Cyberforce/Hunter Killer) are in this bundle. It’s…extremely 90s. Like, just glancing through you’d never guess that you weren’t reading WildC.A.T.S. or something from Malibu comics. They’re cyborg superheroes and they like murdering people with claws, lasers and explosions. I wasn’t into them in the 90s and don’t care now. Aphrodite V is a Cyberforce tie-in and I didn’t really care about it, either. Velocity Vol 2 is about a super-speedster who makes poor life choices, and I get enough of that from The Flash already.

Overall: There are three major buckets here: Sexy comics by the Sejics, the Rising Stars collection, and a pile of mediocre sci-fi experiments. The former is recommended, the latter generally aren’t.

Space Battle Lunchtime Vol. 1 - I was genuinely disappointed to only have the first volume in this collection, because it’s Iron Chef Space, where Peony is a last-minute replacement pick from Earth who has to compete in an outer-space cooking show against various aliens, including a taciturn cute lesbialien who I’m certain she’ll end up with. It’s delightful.

…Then I bought all three volumes in trade direct from Oni Press, because I liked this enough I wanted to read the whole thing. The first two volumes are a complete adorable story and the third is a sequel space-baking murder-mystery. It’s great.

Dodge City Vol. 1 - Dodgeball is serious business as a new kid joins the underdog team. There’s a lot going on here—probably too much, honestly, between the untranslated interactions in Spanish, the deaf kid who communicates by tablet and might end up dating the protagonist, and the family dynamics that aren’t really explored; all wrapped up in a teen sports movie premise.

Fence Vol. 1 - Meanwhile, this is a fencing comic for people who like Yuri on Ice. Pretty boys form deep rivalries over their relative skill at epee fencing and then end up as roommates at a private school. I see exactly what they’re doing and I’m just not interested.

Mooncakes - A young adult witch who lives with her grandmothers reunites with a childhood werewolf friend and starts a relationship, just as a weird horse-demon starts causing trouble nearby. A mix of slice-of-life fantasy, coming-of-age queer romance and horror-overtones YA action-fantasy; with an undercurrent about coming-out trauma and abusive family situations. It felt a little overloaded—like it was trying to do too many things at once—but it wasn’t bad; and I appreciated that it was a complete standalone story.

Mamo - On the other hand, while this is also about queer witches and generational trauma, it has stronger pacing and stronger character beats and comes together really well. It also creates and holds a more whimsical tone despite the subject matter. “Mamo” is the late witch of the town, and her granddaughter comes back to settle her affairs and deal with the mess she left behind, and finds a new friend in the local girl who needs her help with said mess. This is recommended.

Be Gay, Do Comics - A collection of assorted short comics from The Nib; most have a political bent (which, honestly, is going to happen because conservatives have so strongly politicized existing while queer), some are silly, some are genuinely informative. I was entertained by the collection as a whole, but nothing leaps out as particularly the best.

Camp Spirit - A teenaged girl has to get a summer job, and ends up at a sleep-away camp that may hide a terrifying secret…or the camp chief might just be kinda nuts. Features fairly realistic insane small children and terrible/wonderful summer camp memories. (This takes place in 1994; I have to wonder how much of the grumpy protagonist and her love of Nirvana are autobiographical. I hope the love story is based on real life; I hope the demons in the woods weren’t.)

Spectacle Vol. 1 – I don’t love the art style, but the story comes out pretty interesting: Twin sisters are working at a circus, one as a fortune teller and one as a knife thrower. When the knife thrower ends up with a collection of knives embedded in her back, her sister discovers she can talk to ghosts…which will hopefully be helpful to solving the murder, but is also critically necessary to solve both the mundane and supernatural mysteries that plague the circus. (There are at least four volumes of this, and I’m pretty sure I don’t like it enough to hunt them down, especially when I’ve already figured out that the dead sister was romancing the bearded lady, and that’s probably the reason somebody killed her.)

Killer Queens - “They put the sass in assassin!” In a crazy sci-fi space adventure, a pair of queer ex-assassins attempt to go straight (Hah!) but end up running afoul of a space monkey and his hench-otters and then crashing into a planetary rebellion. It’s cute, but it’s not really as clever as it needs to be to justify itself. If you like goofy zap-gun pulp sci-fi and want all the usual tropes but with queer people, here you go.

The Short While – A queer spec-fic epic that goes into great exploratory detail about a dystopian future, including the years following the fall of “the Administration,” a new religion called “The Dance,” and various technological changes. Like all good spec-fic, these are really musings on capitalism, the corruptive nature of power, human nature and the like. But that’s all backdrop and supporting information to the romance of Colin and Paolo and their lives before, during and after their short while together. (I think this greatly discounts the human ability to desensitize to violence and I don’t think the details of the society and the technologies stay 100% consistent across the full work, but that’s also not the focus of it.) This was also interesting while I was musing on the nature of different queer subcultures, because it speculates on a number of them while, as far as I can tell, not including a single straight person in the entire story.

Cosmoknights - There’s a thesis to be written about the abundance of anti-princess queer comics. In this space fantasy, the primary form of entertainment is sci-fi gundam armor jousting, where the winner gets the hand of the local princess to wed or to hand off to their sponsor. We follow the story of Pan, a commoner from a backwater world who makes friends with her local princess and eventually helps her escape before she can be “won.” Years later, Pan falls in with Cass and Bee; Cass is a princess who took the unprecedented step of putting on armor and winning herself, and now pretends to be a knight named Bull to win and free other princesses. While the first volume is a complete story, this clearly has legs to explore the group’s attempts to dismantle the entire jousting system and to find out what happened to Pan’s friend. (And yes, all of the characters are definitely lesbians.)

Barbalien – Jeff Lemire writes a Martian Manhunter story, except “Mark Markz” is gay and become politically active during the AIDS crisis. I was skeptical going in because Lemire often has real trouble getting to the point instead of just being weird; but it’s pretty decent and hangs together as a complete story with a very important climactic point: Sometimes violence is necessary for justice.

The Fifth Beatle - A biographic piece about Brian Epstein, the manager who pushed the Beatles to fame and fortune while he struggled under Britain’s strict anti-homosexuality laws and also (or probably because of them) developed a crippling drug addiction. Interesting, but a little too caricatured for my taste.

The Love Bunglers - Another Love and Rockets sequel/side-story, though I’ll admit I’m not clear on whether they’re supposed to all connect up or whether they’re standalone stories with the same characters (like Archie stories). This one has some serious mood dissonance, as it keeps the “mugging for the camera” goofy art but also includes a flashback to child abuse and several serious assaults. It has a soap opera feel and doesn’t feel like it resolves the various emotional arcs, it just flashes forward and ends.

The Backstagers - A story about the band of misfits at an all-boys school who make up the theater crew, with the added bonus that the backstage is an eldritch labyrinth and a stage crew from years before disappeared into it forever. Clearly written by someone who loves theater and hates actors. Cute concept, middling execution.

Enigma has a horror, Vertigo-style thing going, but the art is painful. Eighty Days has a “age of exploration” vibe to it but couldn’t hold my attention. Wuvable Oaf had some potential as a slice-of-life comic about a giant, hairy man constantly covered in cats, but I couldn’t get into it. The Complete Wimmin's Comix is a compilation of the 70s underground comic anthologies created by the Wimmen’s Comix Collective. They are not For me. Boys Run the Riot 1 is clearly a boy’s love manga, as is 10 Dance 1; and neither appealed to me. Similarly, Massive is taglined “Gay Erotic Manga and the Men Who Make It,” which seems like a fun book for manga fans, but I’m not into it.

This bundle also included an assortment of comics I already had from other collections: Wynd Book One: Flight of the Prince, Tea Dragon Society, Kim Reaper Vol. 1, Wet Moon V1, Lumberjanes Vol. 1, Princess Princess Ever After and the Q&E Guide to Queer and Trans IDs. (You absolutely should read Lumberjanes if you haven’t already.)

Overall: Space Battle Lunchtime is delightful. Mamo and Camp Spirit were also standouts. I don’t know if I’d necessarily recommend The Short While, but I found it really interesting.