Frankenstein Archives

My pull list just keeps getting bigger and better! This week, The Pull List is twenty-six issues long with seven new number ones, four issues with Batman, and an average rating of 3.17.

What did I pull this week? Well, I’m still not caught up on my Superman, but I’ve got a pretty big cross-section of DC and Marvel on my list, plus a handful of smaller publisher titles!

Aftershock Comics
- Monstro Mechanica (2017) #3
Boom! Studios
- Giant Days (2015) #35
- Mech Cadet Yu (2017) #6
Dark Horse
- Incognegro – Renaissance (2018) #1
DC Comics
- Batman (2016) #40
- Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles (2018)#2
- Justice League (2016) #38
- Milk Wars: Mother Panic / Batman Special (2018)
- Swamp Thing Winter Special (2018) #1
- Young Monsters In Love (2018) #1
Image Comics
- Paper Girls (2015) #20
- Twisted Romance (2018) #1
- VS (2018) #1
- Witchblade (2017) #3
Marvel Comics
- Avengers (2017) #679
- Black Bolt (2017) #10
- Black Panther – Sound And Fury (2018) #1
- Hawkeye (2017) #15
- Iceman (2017) #10
- Infinity Countdown (2018) – Adam Warlock One-Shot
- Rise of the Black Panther (2018) #2
- Rogue & Gambit (2018) #2
- Runaways (2017) #6
- Spider-Man (2016) #237
- X-Men: Gold (2017) #21
- X-Men: Red (2018) #1

Marvel/DC Issue of the Week: Justice League (2016) #38, DC Comics

Justice League is finally back to being amongst DC’s most exciting books every month with Christopher Priest at the helm for the first time since Darkseid War in the latter part of New 52 in 2015.

Marco Santucci’s pencils on this are brilliant right out of the gate! Flash’s one-man reenactment of Sandra Bullock in Gravity is riveting and an absolutely amazing blend of real science and comics magic. It plays out over a League realizing just how reliant they’ve become on technology, both to back them up and to tell them what to do and where to be.

What makes the story unusual is that Batman is the physical representation of that weakness – not Cyborg. As a brilliant tactician who is just a regular man, Batman uses technology to enhance his detective skills and the breadth of his knowledge. Yet, that can easily be used as his own Kryptonite when there’s a situation he cannot strategize his way out of.

Just as Flash keeps emphasizing “I’m only a scientist, not an engineer” as he tries to arrest his free float through space, Cyborg is an engineer first and a tactician second. He’s not Batman. He “doesn’t want to be the boss.”

What happens when Cyborg has to take charge of the League in a way that’s greater than just Boom Tubing them from place to place? Can he fake being a leader with engineering in the same way Flash fakes being an engineer with science?

I don’t know, but I am transfixed by this Christopher Priest arc!

Small Publisher Issue of the Week: Mech Cadet Yu (2017) #6, Boom! Studios

With the way this book has been going, it’s going to be really hard for anything to excite me more in a week that it’s on the stands.

If you haven’t seen my breathless catch-up on this Greg Pak/Takeshi Miyazawa series in this week’s Back Issue Review, here’s the skinny: years ago a giant semi-organic robot crashed to Earth and bonded with a pilot, and ever since then four mechs descend into our atmosphere each year.

To find the four pilots that will bond, the US maintains a Hogwarts-esque Mech Academy to train the best and the brightest. We need them, because a race giant Kaiju monsters named Shargs are constantly creeping into our orbit and can only be repelled by the mechs.

We’re in the middle of the second arc of this book now after it was extended past a mini-series, presumably for just being unbelievably excellent (and also selling a few copies). I cannot tell you the last time I got this nervous about characters in a comic book being in peril.

This series continues to perfectly toe the line between Pacific Rim and Harry Potter, and I just want there to be 20x as much of it so I can keep reading more! [Read more…] about The Pull List: Justice League, Mech Cadet Yu, Batman, Giant Days, X-Men Red, & more!

Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E. #1

Written by Jeff Lemire, art by Alberto Ponticelli

Rating: 4 of 5 – Excellent

In a Line: “And so far, I must say I am worried. This place is an advertisement for mad science bound to go wrong.”

#140char Review: Frankenstein #1 makes magic happen w/outlandish plot, gruff antihero, & messy/sketchy art. Perfectly exciting debut left me howling for more

CK Says: Buy it!

Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E. #1 is a great comic book, and I’m shocked it’s out as an ongoing under the banner of DC. It goes to show that The New 52 isn’t completely for show – some different concepts are really getting a trial run as marquee titles, and it’s up to readers to show their support.

I was cold to this book for about half the issue. A miniature base in a a bubble that requires agents to shrink down to size to enter. Disposable organic robots that dissolve after a day of use. A master who randomly swaps bodies every decade, and is currently inhabiting an Asian school girl. A special forces squadron of volunteer monsters.

It all sounds rather tiresome. Yet, somewhere in the middle of the issue it turned from an obligatory read to a page-turner.

A lot of that has to do with the constant slinging of madcap plot points from author Jeff Lemire. (Yes, that’s the same Lemire that illustrated Animal Man. He is amazing.) If oddball details had been hammered into the ground I would have found them awkward. Instead, each was treated as routine – just another minor facet of an outlandish and compelling world constructed around our titular horror. Not explaining the ridiculous reality of the book gives the reader tacit permission to just not care where Frankenstein came from or why he’s a hero. The book became immediately more enjoyable.

I’d be lying if I said it was solely my suspension of disbelief that kept me hooked until I was really hooked. Actually, that can be chalked up to art from Alberto Ponticelli. I love the deliberate messiness of his pages, things left sketchy and roughly hewn. Yet, he can also scale back to show a clean panel of faces. At points he is definitely reminiscent of Chris Bachalo’s DC work.

The plot? Some sort of hell mouth has opened in a remote town, expelling hordes of carnivorous monsters. The Bride of Frankenstein went missing trying to contain it. Now it’s up the Frankenstein and his horrific team to monster mash their way through the town to plug the hole and locate Bride. If it sounds silly… well… it sort of is, but the book never descends into humor despite a few consistently wisecracking characters and an even-funnier straight man werewolf.

Frankenstein’s DC history is short and relatively recent, and doesn’t seem to have much bearing on the proceedings here. Lemire uses SHADE’s computer to narrate through a few otherwise incomprehensible situations. For a while we’re left to think it’s talking to Frankenstein, but by the end of the book it is addressing us directly. Again, advantage Lemire, who am I now mildly obsessed with.

This isn’t a perfect issue, but it is perfectly entertaining and absolutely worth a purchase. Pick this up while you still can, and while we can still send a signal to DC that we want more of Lemire and Ponticelli’s edgy horror on the slate for many months to come!

(I’ll offer the minor caveat that I have a confirmed soft spot for horror tropes used in not-entirely-horror idioms. See also Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula, Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Kripke’s Supernatural, etc.)