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I hate to say this folks, but after two months of pushing myself to my limit, I just don't have the creative energy to do a theme this month. So it's back to the generic random hodge-podge nonsense that you were used to before. I just wish I had a Star Trek trade in here so at least the title would make sense. So let's get this off and rolling.
The Punisher: The Slavers: This book has a lot of what you'd expect from Garth Ennis Punisher. Mob bosses getting seriously maimed and murdered in increasingly gruesome ways. It has conspiracy and black mail. It has good people hurt in the worst possible way because of a good person trying to help them. Said good person making a deal with a deranged psychopath to get some form of retribution. The only problem is that this volume has something the others did not: the same level of preachiness you usually find in the more recent seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Human trafficking is a horrible thing. In most other series, one should not go treading on the subject matter lightly. The Punisher is not a series known for oodles of touchy feely compassion. He is The Punisher, not The Bo-Bo Bunny Distributor. While not a god in any sense, at the character's core he is an uninhibited, unrestricted, unrepentant instrument of
vengeance. A good Punisher story exposes the reader to horrific truth about our society. We all claim to be people of virtues, law and morality when in our heart of hearts, if we thought we could get away with it, we wouldn't want justice of the gavel but the justice of the gun. The great Punisher story, the type I have come to expect from Garth Ennis, we also see just what that type of justice would cost us as people to obtain. While it is definitely a good story, it was not of the usual Ennis quality. So at fifteen bucks, I have to say flat out "No."
Essential Silver Surfer Volume 2: Steve Englehart is one of the most underrated writers the super hero genre has ever had. His take on Silver Surfer was refreshing. It was similar enough to the Lee/Buscema stories that it doesn't anger long time Surfer fans. However, the emphasis was a little different. While Lee's stories tended to be melancholy about the pain of loss and servitude, Englehart's stories are about discovery, hope, freedom and redemption. Not to say that the Surfer doesn't suffer. He learns and grows. He begins to roll with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. After the loss the Shalla Bal, he finds love again. The stories are Marvel cosmic in a strictly human sense. It's a contradiction that Englehart only begins to explore. The book also includes two Stan Lee Silver Surfer stories. The opener may be one of the most interesting looks at the relationship between Surfer and Galactus ever put to the
page. The second, featuring art and plot by John Byrne looks gorgeous. The plot is a good bridge between the Surfer of old and Surfer that Englehart later seeks to build. Overall, in spite of the fact that I accidentally tore the contents page when I dropped it, I give this one a "I got what I paid for" at a mere $7.
New Mutants Classic Volume 3: I have made no secret of my deep respect for Chris Claremont's run on the X-Books in general. They have not been plotted that adeptly since his original departure. The problem with his work is the occasional pacing problem. I have commented in my previous columns that the Essentials seemed almost tailor made for his works. His single issues really run together and can sometimes take 20-25 issues to really run their course. The pacing issue shows up more when you realize that the Demon Bear story really began in New Mutants Graphic Novel (contained in New Mutants Classic volume). Various hints on how dangerous it is pop up through New Mutants 1-16. Then this big colossal major threat that everyone has been dreading finally shows up and is bested in three issue. When reading it as separate volumes it reminds me of a joke that my grandfather loves to tell. A man is about to go to bed and gets a phone call. The voice says: 'The viper will come in two day's time." He gets scared and can't get to sleep all night. The next day he has a horrible day at work. He goes to bed again. The phone rings. The voice says "The viper will come tomorrow night.' The man barely sleeps again and has another horrible day at work. He goes to sleep and there is a knock on the wall. There is a man with a scrub brush peering through the glass. He says: "I am the viper. I'm here to vipe the vindows." What keeps that story from completely falling apart is Claremont's endless stream of B plots. From Sam and Roberto's friendly rivalry, danger room sessions gone horrible wrong, Illyana's growing concern about Limbo, Rahne's rampant prejudice against pretty much everyone except for Dani and Sam, and the slow introduction of Warlock. Bill Seinkiewicz's offbeat art while crazy and imaginative seems a little out of place at first but by
his second or third issue he's found his place. He was born to draw Warlock. The issues are simply a joy to look at. At $11 it was worth it.
Weapon X by Barry Windsor-Smith: Visually speaking, this might be one of the best Wolverine stories ever done. Otherwise, and I know I'm in the minority when I say this, but this is the point where Wolverine became a bland character. For the first eighty pages we listen to the scientists yap on about how dangerous Weapon X is as they slowly torture him. Then we get fifteen pages of him killing everyone. Only to have the rug pulled out from under us as readers in a cheap virtual reality game, just so Logan can spend another fifteen pages killing everyone all over again. It was the endless stream of virtual reality, fragmented memory and misremembered dreams that took the character that was a finely tuned morally conflicted character by Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Frank Miller into a mindless killing machine. If Wolverine is going to kill everyone, he only needs to do it once. In short, this is the template for almost a decades worth of
mostly horrible X-book stories. Not to say there weren't good stories still being written but here was the first hints of the horrors that were to come. Was it worth fifteen bucks, no way. Not at all.
Punisher: Barracuda - Brutal senseless violence? Check. More profanity than you can shake a drunken Irishmen at? Check. Preachiness..... I said preachiness? That's a negative. A vent for all the people who lost money by investing in Enron? Check. This trade is probably more timely now in light of Lehman Brothers, AIG and the whole subprime mortgage scheme collapse than it was back when it was first released. If your idea of a wild Friday night would be to stalk and gun down the ex-CEO of Citibank, you should really read this book. In a story that links a manufactured energy crisis, sex, drug trafficking and a cannibalistic gun mercenary this book is filled with The Punisher bringing his crime fighting techniques to Wall Street. It is filled to the brim with Ennis's sick sense of humor. It is obviously not for the weak of stomach. At ten bucks, I'm glad I got this one.
Batman: Year One: There are some comic stories that are so incredible that they are hard not to like. Batman: Year One is one of them. It has so influenced Batman, in comics and elsewhere, it was hard to not hear the voices of Kevin Conroy as Batman and Bob Hastings as Gordon. The story is simple and straight forward. The one weakness, in my point of view, is that Frank Miller goes to great lengths to introduce Selina Kyle and at least in this four issue story there is no pay off. She interacts with Batman for roughly a page. It's almost as if they knew they had 15 pages to fill so they threw in Catwoman. Needless to say, the rest of the book is amazing enough that you almost don't notice that. The character of Gordon is so engrossing you almost wish that the book was called: Jim Gordon: GCPD Year One. The story is very much Gordon's story as he struggles to realize that it is Batman's city, he just works there. At $10 bucks it was worth it.
X-Men: The Manga: Let's just say for some reason you wanted to make the X-Men into a faux Japanese style high school melodrama. So you try to find a character that fits that girl next door model that those types of stories tend to focus on. So let's say you have a character who has become beloved by fans for being bright, geeky, sarcastic, kn?ws when to follow her instincts and turn her into one half catgirl and one half lobotomized Nancy Drew? Do you make Xavier and Magneto best friends? Do you turn the Hellfire Club from a sinister technocratic cabal into a fraternity? Do you make Colossus look like Super Mario in his normal form who just happens to turn into a mustached version of The Iron Giant? The Editors at Del Rey certainly thought so. If I believed in an afterlife, I would avoid doing bad things ever again out of fear of being forced to read X-men: The Manga for all of eternity. Do not read this book, no matter how
curious you might be about how horrendous it is. If you think what Joss Whedon did to Kitty Pryde was unforgivable, you haven't read this book. It'd have Chris Claremont spinning in his grave and he is still very much alive. It is like someone performed wired electrodes up to my pain receptors. Then every time I read a word balloon or examined the art, someone kept pulling the switch. I have suffered through bad adaptations of X-Men before, but half expected TV's Frank and Doctor Clayton Forrester to show up between chapters and apologize for it. The best possible thing I can say about this book is that it reaches a new quality threshold. A threshold of $%&!, but a threshold none the less. Put that on your book jacket and smoke it.
Sgt. Frog: Volume Sixteen: I am an avid supporter of the Keronian invasion of Pokeopen. This volume is something I'd never thought would happen to the Sgt. Frog. It was slow. There were hardly any invasion plans. It was almost entirely short character pieces. That is not only strange for Sgt. Frog, but strange for any manga this far into the series. I was laughing so hard through most of these stories that I did not realize this until the very end. Not since "The Big Lebowski" has bowling been that exciting. The meeting of the moms was a scream. This volume wasn't quite as random or silly as the usual packet of Sgt. Frog adventures, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes you need a taste of normal just to realize just how weird a series actually is. At $10, I got what I paid for.
Rose: As most writers are early to figure out, it is incredibly hard to do prequels and have it work out well. Mostly because many readers have already read the work that comes after it. This has been a problem for Tolkien on down- and it comes down to suspense. It is hard to make as much investment in an action sequence when you know who is going to survive and who isn't. While Rose has it's share of these moments they don't severely damage the enjoyment as much as "The Phantom Menace." Jeff Smith's Bone told just as much of Rose's story as was important to know. Rose fills in the gaps but not all them. In some instances, it even causes there to be more questions than there were in the first place. For instance, we know Grandma Ben had at least one adventure with Rockjaw but at no point in this book does that adventure take place. So where is that story? Or her meetings with Kingdok? Another amazing thing is that
it is surprisingly free of any major continuity errors What really makes this book a treat is the art of Charles Vess. I bought the Complete Bone in the Cartoon Book black and white printing even though the Scholastic printings in color were available. I couldn't resist spending ten dollars less to get the story in color and painted, no less. This book was free and was probably the best of the lot this month.
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