Year: 2015

Dreaming Eagles #1
Creator & Writer Garth Ennis
Artist Simon Coleby
Colorist John Kalisz
Aftershock Comics

Aftershock comics has quickly become the new Valiant, publishing a small group of high-quality titles by big-name creators. Ultimate Comics has introduced me to Marguerite Bennett’s erotic horror, Insexts, and the Conner-Palmiotti superhero Quixote Super Zero. This week, Garth Ennis publishes Dreaming Eagles, a war story that’s not what you think.

Garth Ennis has a long-standing association with war comics, including a limited series about Nick Fury in Vietnam and a Secret Wars miniseries about fighter pilot The Phantom Eagle. So even though I don’t tend to enjoy historical fiction around World War II, I trusted that he would entertain me with this tale of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first unit of African-American pilots in the US military. I figured it would be heroic and sweeping, with lots of cool sound effects.

But instead, Ennis sets his tale in 1966. Atkinson is a veteran Tuskegee Airman running a quiet little bar somewhere above the Mason-Dixon line and trying hard not to think about his nightmares of sending other human beings to their deaths. His son comes home wounded from a Martin Luther King march, angry that his father isn’t taking an obvious role in the civil rights movement, and they begin a long talk about what happened twenty-four years prior and how that has shaped the way Mr. Atkinson sees race in America. Ennis is able to drop historical data, such as the defeat of Nazi athletes by African-Americans Joe Louis and Jesse Owens, without making a sound, and he’s able to transition into the American racism that kept good men out of military service without losing the importance of his message. It is rare to find anyone who can compare anything to Nazi Germany without looking hysterical, and Ennis does it perfectly.

For a story with minimal action beyond one four-page nightmare of a plane getting shot down, this comic was gripping. Mr. Atkinson’s view is a surprise in a world where Facebook has made conversations about race more prominent, if not necessarily easier, and I have faith that Garth Ennis can make this man sympathetic even if I don’t agree with his decision to just let segregation keep going and trust races to mind their own businesses. The younger Atkinson is angry but maintains a nobility, respecting his father enough to talk instead of falling into that tired cliche of yelling in a kitchen and storming out. Mrs. Atkinson also plays this incredible go-between role. She won’t undermine her husband’s disciplining of their son, but when they have some privacy, she tells him, “He’s learned things we didn’t, and he has different ideas than us… He doesn’t hate you. He doesn’t disrespect you. It’s just that he’s going to leave home one of these days, and all he’ll have to live his life with is what he’s figured out for himself. Wouldn’t it be good if his father didn’t seem like such a mystery to him?” I want to know everything about her, a character who knows what she’s seeing and is able to force a change by appealing to the humanity of her men rather than yelling at them to make nice.

I thought I didn’t want to read a war story. I hadn’t realized that the war story Ennis wants to tell is the one for racial equality that we still fight today. Aftershock has nailed it again, delivering a near-perfect comic book with nary a cape to be found. Come on by Ultimate Comics in Raleigh or Chapel Hill and get started on this new adventure.

MATT CONNER for Ultimate comics

The Rocketeer At War #1
Script by Mark Guggenheim
Art by Dave Bullock
Colors by Ronda Pattison
IDW Publishing

The Rocketeer was the first book anyone at Ultimate Comics ever recommended to me. It was a slow week, and Eric Hoover said, “Hey, you read the Rocketeer?” I thought I remembered liking the movie as a kid, but mostly just how perfect Jennifer Connelly’s makeup was and how bad I wanted a jacket like Billy Campbell’s. So Eric showed me the new collection of Dave Steven’s 1980s series, and I loved the bright immersion in pulp excess. Test pilot Cliff Secord gets ahold of a jetpack and has grand adventures in the 1930s with a cute bulldog and his girlfriend Betty, a bombshell brunette with a lot of winking toward the provocative model Bettie Page. Years later, Alan has asked me the same question and handed the first issue of a much more grown-up book that fans of the original series or movie will really enjoy.

The story is that in 1942, Cliff has donated his jetpack to the US military and is a foot soldier in North Africa, dreaming of flying and reading love letters from dear Betty. In a conflict, he rescues a beautiful Irish pilot who threatens his commitment to his girlfriend in California. While working on a plane engine, he sees a Nazi steal an experimental piece of machinery, and his heroism in its recovery convinces the government to give him back the Rocketeer suit. Well, the heroism and the fact that every person who’s tested it so far kills himself flying it. And for the cliffhanger, Betty sends another letter – she has joined the Women’s Auxilliary and will be joining him in Tunisia!

This book has the fun of the original, with bright colors and broad panels and clean lines all over the place. But there’s an element of growing up that I found fascinating. Cliff is a brave man, but as of 1942, he has given up his suit because he cares enough about his country, and he is just as brave on the battlefield as he is in the Los Angeles skies. He’s sad about not flying, but he’s able to own it and not pout about how unfair it is, so when he gets the pack back, it feels earned, not a brat getting his toy back. The shocking death of the Rocketeer test pilots lend an eerie tone to the series much more personal than even the Nazi tanks could – I am not afraid for Cliff getting a bullet over Tunisia, but I am afraid for him in an uncaring government experiment. Most importantly, the sexy RAF pilot Molly “Roxy” O’Hara brings to the book this element that challenges so much of the pulp genre – the handsome hero always gets the girl. I’m fine with that. I love that part of the story. But here, a man who faced down a German rifle and a Nazi thief has to look a beautiful woman in the eye and tell her he has a girlfriend at home. It’s a different kind of fear, a different brand of courage, and he fails it. He isn’t cheating, not yet, but he is very much aware that he’s withholding information. I am cool with more fights against the Nazis for the rest of this series. But I am gripped by the idea that Cliff has not grown up enough to be brave enough to reject the gets-the-girl cliche. That’s the story I want to explore, and I can’t wait for Betty to get to the battlefront.

If you like adventure, romance, and fun, head down to Ultimate Comics in Chapel Hill and Raleigh and pick this one up. They’re closing early for Christmas Eve and will be closed Christmas Day, so don’t wait!

-MATT CONNER for Ultimate Comics

Writer/Creators Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti
Artist Rafael De Latorre
Colorist Marcelo Maiolo
Aftershock Comics

Back in college, I took a course on Don Quijote. All I knew before was the bit about the windmills which, spoiler alert, is two pages of a book with more than seven hundred. The book itself was a terrific, biting satire or Spanish society at the time, emphasizing the downright silly fascination people had with pop culture. In that book, the Don read so many stories about knights that his brains dried up and he went out to resurrect the knighthood on the Spanish highways.

Superzero applies this to comics, and though it’s still packed with humor, it is scary as heck. Drusilla is a young woman who has read so many comics that she is convinced that superheroes are the result of a puzzle solved by combining elements from each of the world religions in an attempt to stop a cycle of planetary death and rebirth, and in an effort to prevent our sixth Apocalypse, she has decided to set up the most common superhero origin stories to cast herself in the savior role.

Her intelligence and wit are charming, but her convinction to a delusion is unsettling, and the way she throws around comic references feels way too much like how we speak at 8:00 Wednesdays waiting for Alan to let us in the comic store. Her parents might be hiding something supernatural, and I hope for her sake they are, but the book is just as good if she is one of us who has just gone around the bend.

The writing is tight, moving through dense text with a casual but determined air, and the art looks like the independent film this book should become, with realistic bodies and carefully-placed props.

With last week’s Insexts and this week’s Superzero, Aftershock Comics is on a roll. Come on down to Ultimate Comics in Raleigh or Chapel Hill to get on board this one. But, umm, maybe you should read a nice textbook before you spend too much time in your stack.

-MATT CONNER for Ultimate Comics

Marguerite Bennett has been gaining attention for prominent female characters in books like A-Force, Angela, and DC Bombshells, but Insexts is a chance for her to tell an original story blending feminism and sexual diversity with gory horror in Victorian London, and it’s a fantastic trip.

Lady Bertram is a beautiful young woman trapped in a loveless and barren marriage to a cruel, unfaithful viscount. She falls in love with her stunning maid, Mariah, and during an intense sexual experience, Mariah impregnates her with something vaguely insectoid. This gives Lady Bertram the confidence she needs to claim a better place in her own home and send a brutal message to her husband, and as the issue closes, the lovers are gradually changing into woman-dragonfly hybrids.

This book was great. The sex scenes were graphic but very much necessary to the plot, providing the abandon and pleasure that make Lady Bertram’s scenes with her husband and neighbors so oppressive and sad. The gruesome body horror pops out of the stuffy English background (Ariela Kristantina’s art is gorgeous even with slimy eggs and bloody walls), but the story also juxtaposes the beauty throughout, with a repeated theme that “from rot the beauties of the world can only ever spring.”

Insexts is an original work that will stay with the reader, both for hot sex scenes and messy deaths. Come on down to Ultimate Comics in Raleigh or Chapel Hill to find out more!

-Matt Conner for Ultimate Comics

Tom King is a relative newcomer to the comics writing scene, but he has already turned heads using his military experience to convert Dick Grayson into DC’s premiere superspy, and last month, he scared the crap out of me with his take on The Vision for Marvel. Mitch Gerads is a long-time friend of the North Carolina Comicon and is well-known for his grim realism on such weapon-heavy books like the latest volume of The Punisher. So an eight-issue Vertigo miniseries about life in Baghdad ten months after the fall to American forces sounds like a scary, powerful, enlightening experience.

It’s the best work I’ve seen out of either creator thus far, even including that Grayson-Five-Years-Later one that made me cry a little. It’s haunting and provocative and deeply respectful, and I feel convicted as an American to pay close attention to this material.

The book is, at this point, a layering of three stories set in February 2004. Christopher is an American soldier training Iraqi men to police their own city in preparation for eventual extraction of US troops. He gets word of a frightened suicide bomber and heads in to talk her down before a painful, tragic resolution, and as he reels from this experience, he is tasked to investigate the murder of one of his trainees in a city with zero supportive law enforcement infrastructure. Sofia is an amazing Iraqi woman rising to power via her relationships to the US and local/tribal authorities. She may be able to help Christopher, but her story suggests she is more of a femme fatale. Nassir is a Baghdad resident reluctantly accepting a dangerous and brutal mission – his connection to the tapestry is less clear, but his story is gripping.

This book is amazing. King’s politics are not discernible from the page – he neither criticizes nor praises the US presence in Iraq. His story is much more about the profound difficulties that arise from this clash of cultures, how none of us understand each other yet and how hard it is to even start asking the right questions for that to happen. The plot pulls beloved noir tropes like the brave-but-flawed male hero, the mysterious corpse, the secretive woman – this is Chinatown in Baghdad. Gerads gives each character such life and identity that it feels like watching Traffic all over again, enjoying the attempt to map out relationships and learning so much about our own cultural blind spots. This book has HBO miniseries potential.

Come to Ultimate Comics in Raleigh and Chapel Hill to pick up a copy for Mitch Gerads to sign next time he returns to the NC Comicon. Please tell him I loved it.

-Matt Conner for Ultimate Comics

Ringside #1
Writer Joe Keatinge
Artist Nick Barber
Image Comics, Inc

Alan smiled when he handed me this week’s assignment and chirped, “It’s about wrasslin’!” I was actually pretty excited based on that. I’m pretty sports-naive, and my knowledge of wrestling consists of adolescent hours watching the Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling, a devotion to action movies starring The Rock, Steve Austin, or John Cena, and one pay-per-view event in high school. And after reading today’s issue, I think my knowledge of the sport is about the same. But man, this book is one of the strongest first issues I’ve seen in a long time.

The story of Ringside follows Dan Knossos, a man retired from life as the colorful wrestler, The Minotaur. He’s coaching wrestling in Japan but returns to California when his ex gets into trouble. Readers are treated to scenes of a man on a mission as he checks in with helpful people from his past and explains repeatedly that he has left his competion days far behind him. This is not a comic about wrestling, not primarily. This is a comic about crime, about obsession, about duty, about the way we give up the things we thought defined us. This is Southern Bastards without the football. This is Darwyn Cooke’s Parker adaptations without the retro style. This is Criminal without… well, this would actually be a terrific issue of Criminal.

Joe Keatinge’s writing is amazing on this one. I loved his adventure tale, Glory, and his lovely bizarre Shutter, but this is my new favorite Keatinge book. His use of profanity is natural and seamless, to where I didn’t realize characters were dropping f-bombs, but his creative construction of curses made me snicker at times. His appreciation for diversity is above and beyond – two major characters turn out to be gay, and they’re not in a relationship together or even headed that way. Keatinge can talk about life for a gay wrestler without feeling like he placed a token into his ensemble cast, and having more than one means he can make one of them a jerk if he wants without coming across as homophobic. This is diversity done well, and I am genuinely moved to see it in a book like this.

Nick Barber’s art, and Simon Gough’s colors atop it, nails the tone of this crime book. The characters all look a little rough, like a good film noir cast should, but the scenes aren’t drenched in moody dark washes. This is a California story, and it remains visually a California story. The backgrounds are sketchier than we see in, say, a Brubaker-Phillips noir story, and many background characters are represented without noses and with dots for eyes, but this feels like a deliberate artistic choice to emphasize the down-on-his-luck tone of the Dan Knossos’s journey.

I loved this book. I want the trade to come out now and I want to buy and read the trade and I want to have an argument in public about this book stacking up against Criminal and I want that argument to devolve into a headlock or full Nelson or whatever the sports word is, I don’t know. Head on down to Ultimate Comics in Chapel Hill or Raleigh to get started with this wicked little journey.

-Matt Conner for Ultimate Comics

Huck is an impossibly charming little tale spinning out of the minds of a pair of artists linked forever with chaos and fear. Mark Millar has written some amazing work using exaggerated violence to entertain and to comment on social ills – see Wanted, Kick-Ass, Nemesis, and Kingsman. Rafael Albuquerque has used his gorgeous and distinctive style to illustrate the menace of American Vampire and crafted a Batgirl variant cover based on The Killing Joke, a scene so scary that he and DC eventually pulled it down out of respect for traumatized readers. I happen to love action and horror, in moderation, and so I approached this new series with excitement and a little trepidation.

And I found a sweet story that Grandma would love. In this quiet farm town in middle America, a large man named Huck works at the gas station and never says much. But the town knows that when someone loses a bracelet, Huck makes sure to find it, even if that means exploring an underwater trash dump. And if he’s holding up the line at the drive-through, he’s probably paying for everyone’s lunch behind him. And if he saves up a little money, he might leave it in a library book to make someone’s day. And he may also fly to Africa and rescue kidnapped schoolgirls. See, Huck was raised to do one good deed a day, so when he developed the Superman-archetype power set, he just saw that as a means to a good end. And the town loves him for it and agrees to keep him a secret, letting him lead a quiet, rewarding, trouble-free life. But the reader knows this can’t last, and sure enough, the end of the book introduces a major threat to Huck’s privacy.

This is a book without the usual monsters. The African kidnappers are bad guys, but no scarier than a decent cartoon villain. Huck is a book about the restraint of the creative team, the commitment to promoting a more broadly-wholesome work than their reputations suggest. It’s Quentin Tarantino doing a guest spot helping Elmo teach counting. It’s Jason Statham visiting a children’s cancer ward. It takes nothing away from their darker material; it’s not an apology. But it’s a powerful example that we do not have to hold to the expectations of others, and I found it inspiring and entertaining. It’s a perfect soothing read after the frenzy of last weekend’s North Carolina Comicon, put on by Ultimate Comics, and I encourage tired con-goers to seek this slice of apple pie from Ultimate’s Raleigh and Chapel Hill locations.

Please please please don’t have Huck accidentally snap a kitten’s neck in the next issue.

In this new Vertigo series, a drug-addicted loser named Reggie Riot is disfigured when some graffiti comes to life, killing his girlfriend and ripping off his arm. This horrific action pulls him into the Art Ops, a group of agents run by his mother in the defense of art. The cool concept is that in this world, art is alive, and the folks at Art Ops run missions like pulling the Mona Lisa out of her painting so she can go into witness protection while a stand-in waits in her frame for the impending theft.

The story is a slow build. Shaun Simon is taking his time setting up his world, and unfortunately, it doesn’t totally work yet. The only real examples readers get for the cool take on art are the Mona Lisa operation and the killer graffiti, but the concept is broad enough that the next couple of issues should be able to enrich the applications of “art is alive.” And really, this is a book that stands out because of the Allreds. Mike and Laura have one of the most distinctive visual brands on the comic stands, with a sixties-infused celebration of the weird that perfectly counter-balanced the violent content of Marvel’s X-Statix team and grounded the space wandering of Mark Waid’s Silver Surfer. To see a world where modern women go on secret missions in amazing mod dresses with the iconic hairstyles of Britain’s sexual revolution – it’s a treat. The graphic horror of the graffiti attack is still vivid and unsettling, but the viewer can rest by looking at the gorgeous depiction of the figures, at the measured division of the page, at the flow of the viewing experience. This is a book to read twice, once to get the story, and once to lovingly take in all the pictures. I recommend that comic readers who can appreciate the visual part of this storytelling medium head down to Ultimate Comics in Chapel Hill or Raleigh to take a chance on this cool new Vertigo series.

(Bonus for North Carolinians, featured guest of next month’s NC Comicon, Gerard Way, is quoted on the cover praising “the next wave of the lo-fi weird!”)

-Matt Conner for Ultimate Comics

There are several creative teams that I can recommend to new readers without knowing anything about the content of their books. Brian K. Vaughan, Ed Brubaker, and Gail Simone are up there. So is Greg Rucka. His run on Gotham Central (co-writing with Brubaker) about the police officers negotiating Batman’s city changed the way we read cop stories and, by extension, how we view superheroes, and I do not think DC’s television landscape would exist without that proof of concept. His work on Lazarus has provided one of my all-time favorite examples of character-driven science fiction, and his heroine is right there with Buffy in my heart. So it is safe to say I could not take on this week’s assignment free from giddy bias.

This only compounded when I saw that Nicola Scott was doing the art duties here. Her work is gorgeous and true, like real life if you and all of your friends had perfectly-rounded butts and always knew how to stand so you looked comfortable and sexy at the same time. Her work on Earth 2 kept me hooked even after the one gay supporting character met the wrong end of a bullet train in the first issue.

I am thrilled to report that the first issue of Black Magick delivers everything I want in a Rucka-Scott project. The story is a perfect Halloween read – Detective Rowan Black is called out of a Fall Equinox Wiccan ritual to handle a hostage situation in town. She’s tough and witty, and she handles the tense situation with humor and confidence even when the hostage-taker reveals his links to her occult identity and suggests the brewing of a dangerous war. It’s a perfect cold-open. We have met this amazing woman, we’ve got tantalizing details about her magical nature, we’ve got a tone that can support a solemn spiritual ritual alongside a joke about cell phones and an action sequence, and we’ve started one Hell of a mystery. The art is largely in shades of grey, but the magical elements (candles, spells, flames) dance off the page in coruscating vivid hues. Nicola Scott is a master of stage blocking, spinning her camera around tight spaces with the utmost preserved details, and the reader closes this book with an unmistakeable sense that opening credits are about to roll. I want everyone to hit Ultimate Comics and read this book, but I almost want more to see this fast-tracked to a TV series so I can roll my hipster eyes at having already read it when everyone in America falls under its spell.

-Matt Conner for Ultimate Comics