Tag: Image Comics

May 15, 2013

Dream Merchant #1

As a writer Nathan Edmondson is known to me, and surely many others in comic circles, for crafting intensely real action stories: the consistent traits displayed in each are his eye for blunt truths, his ear for technical terminology and a mind manipulable towards intense research. His is not then a name that I could cohesively connect to a book about dreams and magical Dream Merchants. Those prior series he scripted – Dancer and Jake Ellis, for examples – had sci-fi twists to their stories, yes, but these were there to garnish hard-boiled military stories that would have worked more than well enough without them. This dish though is one built on a base of [insert preference of metaphorical seasoning here, lets say parsley] and made palatable by thin shavings of the bloody protein we had been served in the past; it’s not then as far a leap of faith as one might think, the elements of a classic Edmondson tale are still here, the ratio’s have just been twisted in a tantalizing attempt to keep things fresh.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a comment
May 9, 2013

Chin Music #1

I don’t like to write a review that merely disses the material it was made in response to, for a number of reasons: firstly doing so would imply that I didn’t enjoy the piece, which is never preferable; secondly I only tend to buy and consume things that I feel pretty confident that I will enjoy, so finding something entirely absent of enjoyment would be off task but thirdly it just seems like a sort of sucky thing to do, especially when so much effort has surely gone into the making of it. I’m not here to harm, I’m not out for blood but I do expect the best from things. Chin Music, however, presents an opportunity beyond the  usual pedantic pessimism of a negative review and so although the book did nothing for me I will say a few words about why; if only to lend some credence through comparison to the rave reviews that usually get put up.

Read the rest of this entry »

2 comments
April 10, 2013

Saga #12

20130411-102355.jpg

I’ve been wondering lately whether or not I was doing the right thing by buying Saga month in, month out; wondering whether I should maybe stop buying the single issues of this sensational comic. I was torn, then lo and behold the world delivered unto me a message, a sign, first by having the series left out of my LCS’s delivery then through Apple controversially refusing the comic the right to be hosted digitally through Comixology ( which I use as a back up in all such cases) because it features, somewhere in a background, the sight of sex, gay sex (007?). It seemed that the world wanted me to stop reading Saga but as I’m stubborn these twists actually only made me more keen to pick up the issue, balancing things out. The real decision on the series future then was going to be made based on this issue and how it managed to close out the comics second arc before the multiple month break.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a comment
March 28, 2013

East of West #1

20130328-100333.jpg

Jonathan Hickman is known in the comic world for his big stories and the even bigger ideas that inspire them. He’s known for scripting sprawling epics for the superheroes he is handed and short but staggeringly dense sci-fi tales in the indie realm. His comics are known for being complex, challenging and convoluted and in many ways his latest, East of West, both bucks an respects these expectations. Taken as a whole it is certainly as weird and wonderful a comic as you could possibly want and yet it is made up only of sequential-art stories – no maps, no graphs, no timelines – that are, when seen solo, quite simple and safe in their own way. East of West then, as its title suggests, is a book built out of conflicts, hybrids and juxtapositions like this; one that shows you black here and white there, distinct from one-another, and assumes that you will mix them to grey, to ambiguity, on your own.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a comment
March 7, 2013

Sex #1

20130307-165005.jpg

…and now that we’ve gotten your attention, here is another comic book about superheroes…or is it? So yeah, for both good reasons and bad that title really grabs you (they say “Sex sells”, well lets hope sex helps sell Sex), especially if you are someone who shops for comics, arguably the audience most used to paying for sex. It is the title that first grabs you, then second perhaps are Piotr Kowalski’s panels – his style a strange but effective merger of photo-realism, pop-art and Aja-esque minimalism that both tells the tale and looks enticing doing it – third is the fact that certain spoken words are set in coloured boxes – a substitute for bolding emphasis or something else entirely? – and fourth the fact that you just bought a book called Sex and your eyes are focusing on the speech bubbles. What’s going on here, is this pornographic material or not? The answers to that and the earlier question are both a strident no.

Read the rest of this entry »

2 comments
December 27, 2012

Mara #1

20121227-091250.jpg

Comics are often though of solely as the province of teen or pubescent readers, as a place for Avengers to fight X-Men in Michael Bay levels of shallow spectacle, but there are a number of writers out there unwilling to yield to such a noxious notion, even if sales suggest that for many it is a popular one and Brian Wood is one of these. Over the years he has established for himself a reputation as a rather radical writer, crafting some of the most polarising and political comic series on the shelf: DMZ shows the awful aftermath of a modern day US civil war, an extension of the partisanship currently perverting democratic process, The Massive tells the tale of environmentalists after the world they tried to protect has ended, exaggerating those natural issues. Here in Mara he does something similar, telling another political parable of sorts only this time Wood has used one of the weirdest settings that I’ve yet seen for such a story.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a comment
November 22, 2012

Comeback #1

Comeback is a clever title for this book because it has so many relevant meanings: it is a time travel story, one in which men are hired to ‘come back’ in time to save friends, family members and prominent figures before they die (provided that the death occurred within the seventy-something day period of the past that current science allows travel to), it will without a doubt feature one or more characters making a ‘comeback’ before it closes (and the seeds are set for some in this first issue) but most of all this is a comic that you will want to come back to, not only next month for the second issue but minutes after you finish your read through of the first. See, Comeback is a complicated comic in the best possible way; it’s a puzzle with compelling individual pieces that seem set to come together in a really stunning way.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a comment
November 14, 2012

Where is Jake Ellis #1

I was late to the party with Who is Jake Ellis?, reading the story sometime after the trade was released ( which was a fair few months after the series debuted due to delays) but I loved it nonetheless, almost glad that i had so I could devour it whole in one extended sitting. It was an incredibly exciting book but one that I wasn’t completely satisfied by; the ending, while fitting didn’t exactly feel final and this is what held me back. That niggling feeling was, however, put to rest when I spotted on the book’s spine an embossed number one. A quick email to the book’s surprisingly open* author Tonci Zonjic later and my suspicions were confirmed, my worries were put to rest. This wasn’t over.

Of course, as all Star Wars fans know, you have to be careful what you wish for; sometimes getting sequels to great things isn’t actually as cool as you may imagine. Who is Jake Ellis? could certainly become the original origin story for a really cool ongoing character, but it could just as easily become a comic book regret, the sequel could cut and counteract the original by removing what made it work: the mystery. Is it? Does it? Given the topic I think that it’s only fitting that I put you through a moment of tension before you find out.

* Where is… wasn’t officially announced until months later and yet even with – or perhaps because of – my complete lack of press ability I managed to pry the news of him.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a comment
October 4, 2012

Harvest #3

Harvest is a five issue mini-series and to help push this fact Colin Lorimer designed a quintych for the covers, an image spread across all five parts. With this third issue we hit the central piece of the picture – quite literally it’s heart – but the comic contained in this cover is not as central as that would suggest. In terms of chronology it is the first issue to run straight through without skipping sequence – beginning where the second issue ended and ending where the first began – but its content consists mostly of connective tissue; it’s an issue spent stitching up past incisions and tying together loose ends before the big action of the finale begins.

Read the rest of this entry »

2 comments
October 3, 2012

Non-Human #1

If the pitch for your book is as insane as Blade Runner meets Toy Story, as Glen Brunswick’s was for Non-Human , then you are going to get a first issue sale out of me, that much is a guarantee. Whether or not I come back though is still entirely up in the air because while a concept as high as that one may be a sure fire bet in the beginning, it makes for a much bigger gamble after that; the higher they are, the further they have to fall. Then you have to factor in the unfortunate fact that novelty fades fast for humans; even something as exciting as all of our toys coming to life can quickly become banal to us, as the book itself shows.  So though it was an easy job for this month, the content of this comic really had to work hard to sell me on the series and you know what? I think it was a winner, but only barely.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a comment
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 189 other followers