Brandon Perdue (64)
A little more than twenty-five years ago, The Legend of Zelda for the Nintendo Entertainment System began one of the most successful video game series of all time. The game cast players as a young hero named Link, who had to traverse eight hazardous dungeons, solving puzzles and earning new equipment, in order to restore the Triforce of Wisdom and save the titular Princess Zelda.
The Answer! is an entertaining, self-aware, little romp through something kind of superheroic, I suppose, in that its title character runs around in a full-body costume and wears a funny mask with an exclamation point on it. The Answer is efficient and doesn’t mind a body count, though sometimes more pressing matters interrupt his explosive interference in convenience store robberies and send him running off to deal with them.
Eddie Wallace is the new navigator for the hauler Carol Ann, which isn’t the prettiest ship, but she gets the job done. Navigation within the solar system, of course, mainly involves plotting trajectories that allow a ship to coast for weeks or months while the crew sleeps through it in stasis – there’s no faster-than-light travel here. Eddie’s never done any of this before – except in sims – and he is, at best, kind of clueless about the life he’s entering, crammed into a small ship with two other people for a long period of time. The better to explain every little thing to him, I suppose. This is John Byrne’s new series, The High Ways, a sci-fi adventure in the 21st century.
SPOILERS BELOW
On the eve of Cybertron’s first free elections, everything has fallen apart. Megatron has returned, inciting Decepticons across the capital of Iacon to riot. The political jockeying of Bumblebee, Starscream, and Metalhawk has consequences, foreseen and otherwise. And, Prowl’s notorious machinations have been building to this moment, and it all revolves around what’s contained in the Black Room. (Not the Black Room where DC keeps all of its powerful magical artifacts, probably. That would be crazy.)
In recent years, alien invaders have had it rough. They’ve fought cowboys, they’ve fought Texans with jetpacks, they’ve even fought dinosaurs. Earth’s lucky to have so many anti-alien fighting forces, and it still has at least one ace up its planetary sleeve: genies. That’s the premise of Jinnrise, a new series written by Sohaib Awan and drawn by Tony Vassallo.
If you aren't reading Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips's crime-and-cults Fatale, this is as good a time as any to start. With the second arc having been finished in the last issue, Fatale is doing a few one-shot stories of which this issue is the first.
I doubt you really need to be sold on Brian Wood. With titles like DMZ, Northlanders, and The Massive in his body of work, Wood’s possibly one of the most competent comic scribes out there. Mara is not like any of those things, but that’s probably a good thing: it’s nice to see someone at the top of their game branch out rather than play it safe.
Nick Sax is a great detective turned hitman. If popular crime fiction is any way to judge, that must happen to most detectives eventually. Despite its name, Happy! is very much the opposite: a bleak, brutal, cynical tale of mobsters and mayhem, and for all that the setup is formulaic and it doesn't thrive. I think maybe because the script is written from the "criminals curse every other word they say for no particular reason" school of dialogue.
I always have a good deal of fun with Super Dinosaur. Kirkman's all-ages series about a kid and his genetically-altered T-rex best friend and their struggles against various villainous forces is good for both its lighthearted action adventure and, for me, its nostalgia factor. As a child of the '80s and '90s, I grew up on cartoons that originated the tradition to which Super Dinosaur belongs – though the comic is a little less restrained by censors and stuff.
SPOILERS BELOW (for the first few issues)
The eponymous character in Ghost has been around for a bit – nearly twenty years – and this issue marks the beginning of a new monthly series featuring the character. This zero issue collects a three-part story originally serialized in Dark Horse Presents #13-15 earlier in the year.