I Vampire Archives – Crushing Krisis

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!

Comics have been cashing on on vampires since long before Twilight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or even Interview with the Vampire.

When interest in super-hero comics began to decline after World War II (and was further assaulted by Frederick Wertham) horror magazines were part of what kept the medium alive. Even after horror comics were censured by the Comics Code, classic monsters still turned up in comic plots.

Marvel’s 1970s title Tomb of Dracula was a mammoth soap operatic battle between Dracula and a bevy of would-be slayers. The 90s brought indie babe Vampirella to popularity, an Elvira-esque busty vampiress.

Marvel and DC have been dipping their toes back into blood for the past few years to see if the time is right to re-capitalize on vampire stories, but neither has quite struck gold. Has the fanged moment passed, in favor of the suddenly hip zombie movement of the past few years? Who knows, but DC and Marvel are both launching a new vampire ongoing this fall to find out.

I, Vampire

Written by Joshua Hale Fialkov, art by Andrea Sorrentino

Rating: 3.5 of 5 – Great

In a Line: “Normally I’d lock you away somewhere until I could find your sire. But, well, y’know…”

#140char Review: I Vampire #1, a bitter Twilight divorce tracks bad romance between noble vamp & lover who wants to consume the world. Unexpectedly arresting

CK Says: Consider it.

I, Vampire #1 is like Twilight written by Anne Rice, disposing of the sappy pursuit of undead teenage love and focusing on the eventual bitter fallout – and how the results can be deadly in the form of a 400-year-old scorned lover who wants to take back the night (and the entire human race) from a plague of superhero do-gooders.

I know that vampires aren’t for everyone, and even the people they ARE for might be a little tired of them after the past few years. That doesn’t change the fact that Joshua Hale Fialkov delivers on both gore and romance as he kickstarts this story from square one.

We get modern day vamp-on-vamp violence of race-traitor Andrew as his vampire slaying is narrated by his recent break with lover Mary. Andrew and Mary have already done the star-crossed thing, and the immortal lovers thing, and now they’re at the point of an ideological divide. Their debate? If you could be a young beautiful superhuman every night for the rest of your life would you content yourself with drinking cow’s blood and working the night shift forever, or would you rather try to take over the world from the masked men who have brightened its corners?

Yeah, it’s a little more complicated than your typical lover’s quarrel, and it has terrifying ramifications for the warm-blooded population of America.

Try to get past the twinkling nearly-nude hot bodies on the cover, which are probably keeping some readers who would dig this title at a distance. The interior art is the ash-colored world of a war comic or Walking Dead, bringing a bombed-out look to Boston at night – where the rubble is a heap of discarded bodies. Despite the loverly narration, we get hints that Andrew is going to be an acerbic post-Whedon anti-hero as he apologizes to fresh vamps for staking them.

The conversational narration has some moments of melodrama, but I felt like they were defused by the illustrations they hovered over. I’m duly impressed with artist Andrea Sorrentino. In the present we have Andrew’s grim vampire hunt through a tangle of limbs. In the past we have a romantic moonlit night that bears the same heavy shadows as the terrifying street scene. Sorrentino likes to draw some horror and revenge into love, Lady Gaga style.

I wasn’t expecting much from this fanged title in DC’s relaunch, but it wound up as one of my favorite books. Whether it’s superheroes or vampires, there is delight in finding a fresh spin on an old story, and I think Fialkov and Sorrentino succeed in this first issue. Yes, reluctant vampires and blood-thirsty lovers have been done before, but not in a superhero universe and not with this tone. It will be interesting to see where they head without the narrative frame they use to keep this one standing, but this bad romance is worth a read.