Image Comics

The Pull List: Batman, Damage, Dark Fang, Ales Kot, & more!

January 20, 2018 by krisis

Welcome back the The Pull List, where I review every new comic I digitally picked up this week that wasn’t X-Men?

I’m still a few weeks away from being caught-up on non-X Marvel books, so my reads were restricted to some young DC titles, DC’s first “New Age of Heroes” launch, and Tom King’s Batman – which I mostly stay caught up upon for the hot takes.

This week’s Pull List includes:

Avengers (2017) #676
Batman (2016) #39
Damage (2018) #1
Dark Fang (2017) #3
Days of Hate (2018) #1
The Further Adventures of Nick Wilson (2018) #1
Ice Cream Man (2018) #1
James Bond: The Body (2018 #1.

Crushing Comics S01E061 – Comic Book Tattoo + The Music of Tori Amos

January 17, 2018 by krisis

Today brings a rare book that I could identify in its wrapping simply by picking it up thanks to its peculiar shape and heft. Comic Book Tattoo is an anthology of stories based on the songs of singer/songwriter Tori Amos, including work from comics stars like Colleen Doran and Jonathan Hickman. That makes this a sort of hybrid episode that’s half Crushing Comics and half a journey through Tori’s massive discography.

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Episode 61 features the hardcover slipcased edition of Comic Book Tattoo: Tales Inspired by Tori Amos.

The Pull List: Avengers in No Surrender, Detective Comics, Mister Miracle, Paradiso, & more!

January 13, 2018 by krisis

Welcome to the second week of “The Pull List,” where I give a quick rundown of all of the non-X comics I read this week.

My pulls this week came from a wide spread of publishers – Marvel, DC, Image, Aftershock, and Valiant! It was also a week where the minutia of the craft really took me out of enjoying the storytelling. I had a lot of bones to pick with letterers, and many comments about pace and continuity.

This week’s Pull List included:

Avengers (2017) #675
Detective Comics (1937/2016) #972
Judas (2017) #2
Mister Miracle (2017) #6
Monstro Mechanica (2017) #2
Ninjak vs. The Valiant Universe (2018) #1
Paradiso (2017) #2
Port of Earth (2017) #3
Rise of the Black Panther (2018)
Runaways (2017) #5
Sleepless (2017) #2
Witchblade (2017) #2
Wonder Woman (2016) #38.

You might be surprised at which of these books I loved and which left me in a seething rage. There’s at least one where I disagree with seemingly 99% of the folks who I’ve seen react to the book in the past few days. [Read more…] about The Pull List: Avengers in No Surrender, Detective Comics, Mister Miracle, Paradiso, & more!

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade

December 6, 2016 by krisis

It’s back, girls and boys!

I had so much fun reading and writing about the WildStorm Universe in November that I’m not quite ready to go back to just reading it, so I’m going to file the occasional continuing readalong post on a much lesser intensity and frequency because I so do not have the time or stamina to write about 126 WildStorm comics every month.

While I’m very eager to pick up all of the books exiting WildStorm Rising to check out their new status quo, I’m going to use the next few installments to review later WildCATs solo outings that fit into pre-crossover continuity – Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade One-Shot, the Spartan: Warrior Spirit mini-series by Kurt Busiek, Zealot’s three-issue mini-series, and some WildCATs anthology stories.

This makes for a fantastic moment to pause and call out a really phenomenal blog: Weathering WildStorm. The author is undertaking this endeavor slightly more slowly than I have been, but he is doing it with the benefit of having read almost all of these books before. As a result, he’s got a fairly well-reasoned reading order that explains how these various side-stories fit. It’s by far the best one I’ve seen on the web in the four years I’ve been getting books together for this read!

Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade was published in August 1995, a hair later than WildStorm Rising, but per Weathering WildStorm’s guidance it directly follows either issue #13 or 14 (and maybe explains why the team was so ready for a break in #14-15). It follows up on Steve Gerber’s strong story in WildCATs Special #1.

The issue begins with an intriguing (and beautiful!) opening scene of all women, including Providence and Destine from Special #1 facing each other down in the remains of Yurgovia.

The next page is an ass-shot of Zealot followed by she and Voodoo fighting while dressed in their best Vampirella outfits. Those art choices are not just for the benefit of one splash page – this issue takes its “Skin Trade” name literally and gives a heavy dose of T&A whenever possible courtesy of artist Michael Lopez.

I’m tempted to write this one off as pure wish fulfillment, but there is considerable plot content tangled up with all the skin. Skin Trade turns Voodoo into a bit of a Mary Sue murder doll at points, but it gives context to her more active role in her own psyche in #18 and then on the battlefield in #19 and WildStorm Rising. It also greatly deepens Zealot’s history, if not her character, and creates a (largely unfulfilled) plot hook.

And, if you can tolerate a heaping of cheesecake, Lopez’s art is truly remarkable throughout the book save for a few pages with one bad inker on a solid team effort.

Final verdict? If you’re going all in on a sequential WildCATs read you ought to include this, but if you’re simply revisiting the high points of WildStorm you can skip it.

Continue reading for a recap of Skin Trade‘s plot. Need a copy? Check Amazon and eBay. As for what’s next, I still need a bit more of a breather to work out a schedule for my my leisurely readalong. [Read more…] about From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – WildStorm Rising

November 30, 2016 by krisis

It’s the grand finale of my daily read of the first three years of WildStorm Comics – WildStorm Rising!

WildStorm Rising is the first direct crossover between any WildStorm books. Just like here at CK the WildStorm crew doesn’t do anything halfway – their first crossover hits every one of their eight ongoing titles, adding a prologue and a pair of bookends for 11 total issues:

Team 7: Operation Hell #1
WildStorm Rising #1
WildC.A.T.s #20
Union (1995) #4
Gen 13 (1995) #2
Grifter #1
Deathblow #16
Wetworks #8
Backlash #8
StormWatch #22
WildStorm Rising #2

The crossover is really only meaningful to a trio of them – dual flagships WildCATS and Stormwatch, and the debut of Grifter. Everyone else is merely a bystander in the culmination of a year-long plot launched in Stormwatch to alter the struggling status quo in WildCATs.

There are pros and cons to any linewide crossover, and WildStorm Rising is no exception.

On the pro side, the event manages to accomplish something that few Marvel crossovers could manage back in the 90s (and still can’t today): Each chapter worked well as an issue of its own book advancing some of its own themes. That’s true despite the fact that many books weren’t written by their typical authors and many of them continued directly to the next title in the crossover sequence.

Plus, we really do get a new status quo for several books, none more so than WildCATs!

On the con side, WildStorm Rising squanders Defile’s long-running infiltration of Stormwatch in favor of him chasing a McGuffin of power discovered in Team 7: Objective Hell. Many of the pillars of plot that support this crossover were built from Defiles machinations, so it feels like a massive cheat to see his master plot lose steam just as WildCATs and Stormwatch come to blows. He almost literally says, “Screw my plans that have been built up in Stormwatch since issue #6, now I’m going to focus on this other thing.”

Even worse, in a hairpin final turn of plot it turns out the McGuffin has no real meaning. It was merely a red herring to bring back a fan favorite character squandered too early in the life of the line!

What is this amazing McGuffin? It’s both a key and a symbol. It’s about the balance of power in the ruling class of Daemonites. When they arrived on Earth in a space ship chasing the Kherubim, there was a natural division of power between politics, military, and (sort of) transportation. A representative of each held a key to the ship that also signified their unquestionable ruling power. All three would need to align their keys to activate interstellar navigation technology so none could shift the balance of power too far towards government, military might, or (one would imagine) commerce and colonization.

The transportation key was lost in the ship’s crash, which left the political and military arms of the Daemonites stuck in a two-party struggle for planetary power for 2,000 years with no means to escape. Now, the two pieces of the lost key have showed up in possession of a rogue Daemonite and a member of Team 7. Both sides of the Daemonites are racing to collect the pieces while the assembled might of our heroes try to defend them (while resolving their inter-squad squabbles).

Is WildStorm Rising worth a read? As a self-contained event it’s nothing special. However, if you plan to read any other WildStorm books from 1995-1997 – like Grifter’s solo series or Alan Moore’s WildCats – it’s a good primer. (It’s far back enough from Ellis’s takeover on Stormwatch to be irrelevant there.)

The rest of this post is split into two sections. The first reviews each issue of the crossover (w/links to purchase) with relatively few comments on plot. The second second offers a plot recap of each issue so you can fill in the gaps of your read if you don’t own every issue.

Want to read the entire thing in one go? All of the material aside from the prologue is collected in a single TPB (Amazon / eBay).