Eat The Rich: The Extinction Parade #3 Review

Editor’s Note: One last review of last week’s comics before the comic store opens…

There is an entire generation of Twilight fans who, after eight years of mooning over broody prettyboys who sparkle in the sunlight and chuck around pledges of eternal love like they’re trying to bubble to the top of a Ponzi Scheme based on the hard fucking of teenage girls, should be kneecapped and forced to read the third issue of The Extinction Parade, written by Max Brooks and drawn by Raulo Caceres.

There is also an entire generation of Keeping Up With The Kardashians fans who, after six years of squealing over the adventures of a yammering pack of B-grade starfucking sisters and their step-something who started life as an Olympic champion and is now visually indistinguishable from a C-List Batman villain, should be kneecapped and forced to read the third issue of The Extinction Parade.

This is because, even though the hook to get people on board with The Extinction Parade was that it was another angle on a zombie apocalypse by the guy who wrote the novel World War Z, it is instead really about vampires, who by dint of their eternal lives, are also the idle rich. And since Brooks is, as I am, a little too old to be a fan of either Twilight or the Kardashians, that means that he knows that vampires are irredeemable and detestable dicks.

The only downside is that this comic series places the vampires still in the Kardashians-on-the-news, Twilight’s-ruining-Comic-Con era of the zombie apocalypse. But the cracks in their perfect little lives are starting to show… and it is sweet.

No Extinction: Avatar Press SDCC 2013 Panel

And here we are: our final article covering San Diego Comic-Con 2013 (except for a bunch of video that my high-toned, dedicated video camera seems to have mangled, unless my actual computer here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office can do anything to salvage them), five days after the convention ended and more than a week after the actual panel occurred. But what the hell; given my crippling hangover and intestinal issues born from the fried chicken sandwich and fries I washed down with five black IPAs at a bar last night, it feels like I’m still at SDCC. So let’s just plow ahead, shall we?

The Avatar Press panel on Thursday morning, July 18th, with Avatar Founder and Editor-In-Chief William Christensen and World War Z and Extinction Parade writer Max Brooks, was the first panel we hit during SDCC 2013, and in some ways it set the tone for the whole convention. The room wasn’t full, but there was a healthy crowd for a comic book related panel on the most off day of the convention. Not that there are any off days at SDCC anymore, but if there is a day that qualifies, it’s this mid-week opening to the full-blown festivities. Unlike Preview Night, the whole convention center is open, and cosplayers are more plentiful, all of which draws people off the floor and makes it at least tolerable to move around; there’s nothing like a set of jugs in a spandex Power Girl suit to peel off the rubes so you can get where you’re going.

But where we were going was a panel, and we were going there later than we should. Which meant we could get a seat up front and to the side… right in front of the projector many panels use to put up new art for display. Which meant that, as a six foot tall gentleman, I spent the panel hunched over like Frankenstein’s delivery boy to stay out of the projector light, scribbling notes almost on my side as if trying to write “I am having a stroke” for the paramedics, just in case Christensen and Brooks put some new art up on the screen.

Which they did not. Every table at every panel at Comic-Con has a posted sign for presenters, reminding them that members of the crowd might be younger than 18. And every fan of Avatar comics knows that there is very little art that they could project that would be appropriate for children. There is very little Avatar art that would not make children long for the sweet release of death, or at least blindness, to tell you the truth. Avatar books are for adults, and that is on purpose.

“I just do books I want to read,” Christensen said. “It will always be intense work for adults.”

We Are The Walking Dead: Crossed: Badlands #20 Review

Editor’s Note: And one last review of the (few) comics of 12/26/2012 before the comic store opens with this week’s new books…

In the annals of zombie fiction, each imprint or subgenre meets a particular literary need. The Walking Dead allows Robert Kirkman to address the long-term effects of constant stress with no civilization on individuals of different types. George Romero uses his Night of The Living Dead stories to satire human pack behavior, such as mass consumerism, blind obedience to the military / industrial complex, and the compulsion to record life rather than living it.

And Avatar Comics’s Crossed: Badlands is generally here so comic creators can write and draw the most depraved and twisted shit they can possibly imagine.

I’m not kidding. Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows created, in their initial run of Crossed, a world where the “zombies” want to eat you, sure… but only after they fuck your holes, stab a few new holes and then fuck them, and then do the same to your friends, family, vague acquaintances and household pets, all in front of you if possible. And subsequent creators playing in the Crossed world have generally embraced this concept with both hands; David Lapham’s last two arcs in Crossed: Badlands revolved around a cowardly teenager who only finds his courage after mistakenly blowing away a teenaged girl he believed to be a zombie (and then fucking her), and then a literary salon that models itself on the old Hellfire Club… until they meet the Crossed, who show them what sexual adventurism really means, by way of the Zombie Cleveland Steamer (where you lie under a glass coffee table while a Crossed rips out your colon, takes it to Cleveland and then dorks it).

Crossed: Badlands is historically the place to go to produce the kind of stories that would get you a no-questions-asked Thorazine prescription if you told it to a psychiatric professional: fun if you like that sort of thing (and I usually do), but not where you look for social commentary or characterization beyond, “people sure do suck, don’t they?” So imagine my surprise when writer Si Spurrier and artist Raulo Caceres turned in a two-part arc about two damaged people, together for the wrong reasons and separated by the Crossed outbreak and their own selfishness, doomed to repeat their destructive cycle. This is a good one. Gross and intense, but good.

Our America – Review Of Crossed: Badlands #4

What are the Crossed? Zombies? Infected, delusional maniacs? Cleveland Cavaliers fans? Who are these creatures and why do they want to violate various orifices in my body while they eat my face? The latest entry in Avatar’s own, never-ending man vs. monster in a post apocalyptic setting, Crossed: Badlands #4, kicks off a new story arc written by Jamie Delano with art by Leandro Rizzo.

Delano’s new arc follows a very brief one by series creator Garth Ennis. That one, set in Scotland, went in perhaps the most predictable direction of any story in Crossed thus far – after 3 issues, everyone was dead or turned Crossed. Pretty much what you’d figure would happen if the world was actually over run by contagious monsters. This new story moves the action back to the United States, somewhere in the swamp lands of the South. Delano showcases a new cast of characters, most of which illustrate the way some of us worry that we Americans come across to the rest of the world: the meth head trailer trash, the disgruntled, water boarding Islamophobe, the degenerate, bored offspring of cocaine cowboys. About the only broad stereotypes that seemed to be missing were The Situation and Snooki – but this is just the first issue. We may still have time to shoehorn them in, yet.

But, is it a worthwhile read? That and infectious spoilers, after the jump!

…In The First Act – Wait, That’s Not A Gun: Crossed: Badlands #1 Review

In an entertainment market glutted with zombie stories, Crossed has historically distinguished itself more in its methods than in its themes. Under the hood, it’s the same as any half-decent zombie apocalypse tale: we follow small bands of survivors as they struggle to survive in a landscape populated by monsters that feel no fear and are only motivated to kill, with the story focus more on how the experience shapes – or warps – the survivors. However, it performs these standard tasks under a paint job of making those monsters less mindless flesh-eaters and more clever and gleeful rape-you-to-death-with-a-pipe-wrench…ers. Yeah, that’s a word. Or at least, it is now. And if you don’t agree, I have this pipe wrench… but I’m veering off track already.

In Crossed’s initial incarnation by writer Garth Ennis and artist Jacen Burrows a few years ago, that gave Ennis a chance to do a pretty pedestrian zombie tale, only propelled by Burrows’s over-the-top visuals illustrating Ennis’s jet-black sense of humor… provided your idea of larfs includes zombies jacking off on their bullets to make them infectious, or another zombie whipping dudes to death with a horse penis. Later arcs, such as David Lapham’s recent Psychopath, toned down the humor to focus, more conventionally if not any less graphically, on the idea of human monsters in a world overrun by more conventional ones.

This week brought us Crossed: Badlands, the return of the original creative team of Ennis and Burrows, so one would assume a return of the book to an exaggerated, almost darkly slapstick story reminiscent of the original arc. However, while it’s still too early in his miniseries to judge how it will end up, instead we seem to be getting a much more character-driven and subdued story. It feels strange to call a story that includes a zombie using an infant as a blunt projectile weapon “more subdued,” but when it comes to Crossed, these things are relative.

Been There, Done That – Review Of Ferals #2

My comics pull list from last week turned out to be heavy on the supernatural. Lots of vampires, even in the cape and cowl books (X-Men #25, I’m looking at you.), magic, and even werewolves. On the upside, nothing sparkled or seemed designed as an excuse to have some former Power Ranger walk around shirtless, and for that I am grateful. On the downside, it feels as though someone in editorial at many of the publishing houses has decided to milk this trend in popular culture until the resultant stories look like Kristen Stewart after she has been even more rode hard and put up wet.

For example, let’s take a look at what turned out to be the best of the lot in this week’s take, David Lapham’s Ferals #2.

Blood, guts, gore and spoilers after the jump.