Quickies: Free Comic Book Day 2010!
My local comics shop brought in a truckload of free comics for Free Comic Book Day. The owner stood in the back behind three long tables of comics - divided into youth, teen and adult - and encouraged visitors to take one of as many as they liked. My partner and I stocked up, walking out with probably a dozen comics between us. Sweet!
Read on for some quickie reviews of some of the titles I picked up: The Sixth Gun, Incorruptible, Irredeemable, Atomic Robo and War of the Supermen.
The Sixth Gun: Beautiful art. That's the first thing I want to say, that this book was really nice to look at. It features an ambient mingling of genres - western, mystic quest, supernatural horror and anti-hero - and it scored major points with me by summoning up fond remembrances of Deadlands, the old RPG that Bruce Campbell once so enthusiastically endorsed as an uncompensated fan that he was showing up at gaming conventions and asking to run a few sessions just to sell people on the concept. As with any genre-jumbling project it's possible that one or another of the ingredients might be sliced too thin and become too generic but this issue has plenty to recommend it.
Irredeemable: I've heard everyone and their cousin recommend this book but I haven't gotten around to trying it myself until now. It's very nicely illustrated and the idea is very compelling: what if the world's greatest hero - an all-powerful Superman-alike - suddenly and inexplicably became the world's greatest villain? A great setup issue and a very likely addition to my bag at some point in the future. I enjoy the way it makes explicit the way in which an all-powerful character such as Superman (or in this case, the Plutonian) will always be other and alien, even to their closest allies. The down-side is that the Plutonian isn't so much a character as an extremely localized and severe weather effect, at least in terms of how much of his motivation we know or understand.
Incorruptible: The flip-over other half of the same book as Irredeemable, this is the one I found more interesting at the character level. It's about Max Damage, the Plutonian's greatest enemy, deciding to become a hero in order to save himself and all the rest of the world from the Plutonian's mad killing spree. This is the one about motivations and human emotions and was definitely the one I found most compelling. Strongly recommended.
Atomic Robo: The same zany, well-paced humor and action as one can expect from this title, with one huge homage to Final Fantasy - the basis of the author's best-known web comic - worked in. I enjoyed it, especially the way in which Clevinger so effectively communicates the passage of time.
War of the Supermen: Yawn. Zod? For real? There is no way anyone or anything can beat the awesome high camp of Superman II and it's crazy for DC to even try. That said, this has some of the best art I've seen from a "standard" DC title in a long, long time - well, outside the Gotham City books. Why does DC have such wood for these world-threatening crises? Can you imagine living in the DC universe? I wouldn't be able to get out of bed and go to work in the morning for fear of an alien race invading my bus.
Klarion
Posted to Review on 3 May 2010
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Other stuff like this: Atomic Robo, Free Comic Book Day, Incorruptible, Irredeemable, The Sixth Gun, War of the Supermen
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