Working With Vertigo: All-Star Western #26 Review

Editor’s Note: None a’ this is real. It is a twisted spoiler.

I have always had a soft spot for westerns, which is why I’ve always read Jimmy Palmiotti’s and Justin Gray’s Jonah Hex stories. Back in the pre New 52 days, Jonah Hex was a solid, straight-ahead western in the Sergio Leone vein, with real scumbag villains out on the frontier and plenty of gunfire to keep things interesting. There were no supervillains, monsters or alien invaders, and dammit, I liked it that way.

Because I always thought that the worst thing that ever happened to the character was when, back in the 80s, they took away Hex’s Colt, replaced it with a laser pistol, and had him fight space aliens or some Goddamned thing. As a guy who likes westerns, it was an abominable idea on its face, like dropping The Man With No Name onto the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise. It might sound like a good idea, but it’s all fun and games until poor Mr. Sulu is left confusedly looking back and forth from his fencing foil to the giant hole in his chest.

So I should be going apeshit nuts over the recent direction of All-Star Western, which has dropped Hex into the modern DC Universe. And I should be going particularly apeshit over All-Star Western #26, which gives us Jonah Hex, relentless bounty hunter and former Confederate soldier, interacting with Swamp Thing, alien plant life, The House of Mystery and a superhero just to round out the trifecta (Quadrifecta? I don’t know a lot about horse racing. I’m not allowed back at the racetrack since I asked the nice lady at the betting window for a quart of fresh glue).

I should be going apeshit. But Goddamn if this issue isn’t one hell of a lot of fun.

Shipping Up To… 2014 Boston Comic Con Initial Guest Lineup Announced

This year’s Boston Comic Con was a hell of a surprise, going from a little con with mostly local talent, held in a hotel basement, in 2009 or so, to selling out two days at the Seaport World Trade Center – one of Boston’s bigger convention halls – with programming and a double handful of A-List talent on the floor to boot. Sure, the convention showed a few growing pains – if you weren’t in line by a certain time it took forever to get into the hall, and for the love of God, they need to stop clearing the programming rooms between each panel – but it was damned impressive nonetheless.

My biggest fear was that it was an anomaly. This year’s convention was supposed to take place in a smaller hall in April and was displaced until August and the Seaport World Trade Center thanks to the Boston Marathon Bombing, which meant a few more high-profile guests signed on either to show support to the city or just because the timing was better. And initially, the word was that the convention was going to move back to April, but instead the organizers announced that they were not only sticking with August, but adding a day, going from Friday, August 8th to Sunday, August 10th, 2014.

Which was a good start… but a better sign is that the convention has already announced their first slate of special guests. And let me tell you: last year’s A-List talent was no one-off fluke.

You’re Trapped In Here With Me: All-Star Western #22 Review

When I reviewed the first issue of All-Star Western almost two years ago now, I was semi-enthusiastic, but bemoaned the fact that the creative team of writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, and artist Moritat, had taken Jonah Hex off of the western frontier and dumped him into Gotham City. As I recall, I referred to the book as “Crocodile Dundee with dead hookers,” because dropping Hex into an urban setting, even in the late 1800s, felt like a well-trod fish-out-of-water story.

So you would think that All-Star Western #22, which features Hex being stuck in modern, 21st century Gotham City, would drive me absolutely fucking apeshit. Because on paper, if All-Star Western #1 was Crocodile Dundee, All-Star Western #22 should be Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles. Seriously, this book has all the elements that should drive me up the Goddamned wall: Hex baffled by a radio? Yup! Hex shocked and offended by the forward nature of modern conversation? Uh-huh! Hex amazed by an automobile? Hell, yes! If you go down the list of the classic fish-out-of-water stories, the only thing that’s missing is Hex trying to take a shit in a phone booth!

So case closed, right? I wasn’t thrilled with Hex in old Gotham, so I must hate Hex in modern Gotham, correct? Well, you’d think so… but it’s really the opposite. I enjoyed the hell out of this issue, not in spite of the fact that it was a fish-out-of-water story, but because of it. Because All-Star Western #22 isn’t a fish-out-of-water comedy; after all, Jonah Hex isn’t funny. He is a very dangerous man… and other than Batman and one or two other guys and girls, there are very few truly dangerous people in Gotham City.

You know… other than Jonah Hex.

SDCC 2013 Odds And Sods, Part One: DC’s Meet The Publishers Panel

We are coming up on the final bits and pieces of coverage we took from this year’s San Diego Comic-Con – yes, I know the convention ended eight days ago, but it turns out we had a lot of video to sort through, and a significant percentage of that video needed extensive processing on an actual computer in order to make it into something that YouTube would recognize as a video file, as opposed to some form of data wad, or perhaps a Word file detailing our manifesto and list of demands.

But the computer has done its work and dinged like a toaster oven (as we all know computers do), so we are finally proud to present a series of videos from DC Comics’s Meet The Publishers panel, held on Sunday, July 21st and featuring Co-Publishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio. And you can say what you want about, say, DiDio (God knows we do, repeatedly), but there is no denying that the guy runs an entertaining panel with an infectious enthusiasm, which even Lee gets caught up in.

This was a fun panel, and we’re happy to bring you, a day late and a buck short, a small piece of it, along with some art that was shown to crowd at the panel. You can check them out after the jump.

Mad In Gotham – Review Of All-Star Western #21

Writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti have put Jonah Hex through a lot in All-Star Western in the last 20 issues. He’s dealt with everything from early Crime Bible disciples to Vandal Savage to Mr. Hyde (yes, as in “Dr. Jekyll and…”. Really.). At the same time, Gray and Palmiotti have created an intricate backdrop that has unfolded from an early Gotham City and spiraled out across post-Civil War America. They’ve populated it with a menagerie of colorful characters, ranging from the familiar, like Amadeus Arkham, to new ones, like The Barbary Ghost. However, starting with issue #19, the writing team has begun to focus on a character with definite ties to the DCnU present, if not the future, time traveling hero: Booster Gold. Does this signal an end to Gray and Palmiotti’s exploration of historical Gotham and its characters?

A closer look at the events of All-Star Western #21, rife with spoilers, after the jump.

The Colour Our Of Space, Which We Then Shoot: The Deep Sea One-Shot Review

If you are a fan of Lovecraftian fiction, The Deep Sea one-shot, written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray with art by Tony Akins, will utterly fucking infuriate you. But not necessarily for the reasons you might think.

If you are, in fact, a fan of Lovecraft, you know the general basic tropes of the classics: a group of explorers go someplace unseen by human eyes. They find a weird city. They do something that awakens a slumbering elder god of some kind – Cthuhlu is always a favorite – whose visage and presence in the world is so utterly alien and wrong that it drives men mad to simply witness it. And then there is the implication that this awakening means the probable end of the human race. If you take that general summary and chuck in the odd racist comment, and you might as well be living in H. P. Lovecraft’s Medulla Oblongata.

Well, The Deep Sea hits all of those elements, save one. And it is the one that is the most common of those elements, and the one that makes the concluding implication of humanity’s doom a satisfying ending. And weirdly, it is the elimination of that element that makes The Deep Sea fresh and interesting despite following almost all the tropes of Lovecraftian fiction, and which will make the end of this comic book irritating to you.

Because you’re gonna want more.

Casualties of Reboot: DC Cancels More Books, Shifts More Creative Teams

It has been 17 months since DC blew up their entire line of comics, shuffled all their creators around to different books, and blew up their entire history of continuity. You know, for everyone except Grant Morrison, who has been allowed to continue his Batman saga that started several years ago in Batman Incorporated like it’s still 2009… or sometimes, considering all the Silver Age characters Morrison’s shoveled into that storyline, like it’s still 1959.

And the New 52 reboot was an unqualified success. It put DC over Marvel, in both sales numbers and dollar earnings, for the first time. It refreshed the classic characters of the DC Universe for a new generation. Truly, those 52 books signalled the start of a thousand-year uncontested reign. Nothing could stop them. They would march to victory on a road of bones. They would drive their enemies before them, see them broken, and hear the lamentations of…

What’s that? DC’s cancelling six more books?

Whoops.

You Don’t Understand! They’re Already Here!: Human Bomb #1 Review

DC’s Human Bomb miniseries, written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray with art by Jerry Ordway, is one of those books that just sort of showed up at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop asking the paying customers if they want to see – or smell – why they call me The Human Bomb, without a lot of fanfare. Kinda like Phantom Lady and Doll Man by the same writing team a few months ago, and their pre-New 52 Freedom Fighters before it, Human Bomb seemed like another low-publicity, low-stakes attempt on the part of Palmiotti and Gray to make someone , somewhere, give a damn about the Freedom Fighters.

And therein has always lain the problem with these books for me: I don’t really care about The Freedom Fighters. Even as a 37-plus year reader of comic books, The Freedom Fighters have always, to me, been that group that got their asses quickly kicked in Crisis On Infinite Earths, and whose members have had a couple of distinguished appearances in James Robinson’s The Golden Age and Starman. Otherwise, The Freedom Fighters was nothing more than the team with Uncle Sam, the girl with the boob shirt who isn’t Power Girl, Other Hawkman, and the dude in the stupid radiation suit.

Well, the dude in the stupid radiation suit was The Human Bomb. And that is really about all I know about The Human Bomb – I didn’t even know the guy’s secret identity until I read The Human Bomb #2 (and, having read the character’s Wikipedia page for background this review, even his identity is something new for the Post New 52 era). And I therefore have no idea if the new origin being presented in this miniseries is historically consistent with the original tale or not. But what I can tell you is that what is here is a pretty interesting, Cold War style story of sci-fi paranoia, fit into the modern New 52 world, with some detailed, damn fine art straight from the guy who inked the character in Crisis On Infinite Earths. It’s Invasion of The Body Snatchers if Dr. Bennell could blow shit up by touching it (and if you could trust the government to pay attention when you started shrieking about Pod People), and it’s actually pretty entertaining.

SDCC 2012: DC’s The Edge And The Dark Panel. Oh, and Neil Gaiman’s Returning To Sandman

First of all people of San Diego: it’s a fucking e-cigarette. It emits water vapor. So please stop passive-aggressively giving me shit when I’m using it on a public sidewalk, out of doors and approaching the convention center, by muttering, “Nothing I like better than a faceful of cigarette smoke blowing into my baby’s face…” Let’s clear the air here (ha!): my e-cigarette emits no odor and bothers no one, unlike your little bundle of squalling fecal production. And since my e-cig doesn’t even burn, the San Diego Fire Marshall even considers it less of a fucking fire hazard.

Okay, I feel better now. Now that we’ve got my personal news out of the way, let’s talk about what’s been happening at SDCC 2012 that doesn’t involve self-righteous self-absorbsion.

The actual programming at SDCC started in earnest yesterday, featuring panels on everything from homosexuality in genre fiction to Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part II. (Rob: This may be redundant. Consider editing. -Amanda)

Smash Cut: The Ray #3 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a comics Website, at a time when spoiler-free reviews roamed the Earth. One review changed all that. It hit with the force of 10,000 spoilers. It has happened before. It will happen again. It’s just a question of when. Which would be now.

So apparently Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray believe that Michael Bay is the greatest threat that has ever roamed the face of the Earth. Having seen two Transformers movies and Pearl Harbor, I’m inclined to agree, although I’d think these guys would put in a bigger vote for the guy who fucked up the Jonah Hex movie.

This issue of The Ray has more of an action-oriented edge than the first issue, which makes sense; in an origin story you need to spend a certain amount of page real estate setting up the characters and the rules of the powers. But after a certain point, you need to get the heroes and the villains into the trenches to beat on each other. And that certainly happens here, but Palmiotti and Gray take things in a slightly different direction than you’d expect. by which I mean The Ray tries very hard to not beat on people in the trenches.

There’s a key scene in this book where The Ray stops the action and tries to talk the villain down. We’ve got more than two full pages of The Ray trying to calm the villain down, along with a few other scenes of the hero aquiescing to demands from authority as diverse as cops to paramedics to pissed-off parents. The Ray is polite, Goddammit, and it not only all makes sense on a character basis – the kid is the adopted child of two stereotypical pot-smoking California liberals as we saw in the first issue – but it’s interesting. After all, if you stop and think about it, having superpowers and using them to beat on someone would probably only be fun if the guy you’re fighting doesn’t have superpowers. If the other guy has them, then it’s just a plain-old fight, and that’s no fun. Having superpowers is probably a lot like having a gun: everyone has someone that they wouldn’t mind shooting, but nobody wants to be in a gunfight.