Blogs
I just got chills as I read the final line in issue twelve of Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crooks’ Harrow County, with Hannah Christensen taking artistic duties from Crook in this issue. Let me begin by saying Harrow County is one of my favorite comics currently on the stands. It’s a dark fairy tale that takes the horror tropes of today and rips them to shreds, then gives us something both spectacularly old and incredibly fresh. This is the type of horror that exists in scribbles on parchment, evils that feel like they’ve been lurking just out of our sight from days long before us, before concrete buildings and digital landscapes. This is the stuff that slowly digs its way under your skin.
Peter J. Tomasi, Ian Bertram, and Dave Stewart continue the descent into madness in their second issue of House of Penance. The one thing we’re not allowed as we’re pitched into this fever dream is a solid reality to grab hold of. It’s like coming out of the womb and you’re drowning before ever having taken in a breath of fresh air. With all dreams and surrealist works of art, we have only our own reality to grab hold of as a point of reference. We know something is wrong, because what we understand through our own experiences informs us that something isn’t right, and that’s what our creators are up to – subverting reality, little by little, away from what we understand to be real. What is real and what is not in this House of Penance will be discovered, I imagine as we go forward, just keep your wits about you.
Matt Hawkins and Rahsan Ekedal are back with another installment of Think Tank: Creative Destruction. With David Loren still working for DARPA and toeing the moral grey area between being a brilliant scientist and also a brilliant scientist who kills people (which is what he does), things get more and more complex as Loren gets put in charge of some majorly shady projects. When one sets off a chain of events that puts David’s entire purpose into question, David, his best friend Manish, and his girlfriend Mirra are going to have quite the time getting out of the political mess they’ve found themselves in.
Just when you thought the future of the Back to the Future comic books couldn’t get any better, well, they just did!
OMG! TMNT!! WIWWM!!! (What is wrong with me!?) I missed a month! How did that happen? Where was I?
I’ve wanted to read this for a while, so I found it most auspicious when I was offered the chance to review the trade paperback of Volume One (Library Edition). It possesses many of the things I like in a story: scifi, mystery, and a post-apocalyptic world. Written by Brian Wood with most of the art done by Kristian Donaldson and Garry Brown, it offers up a world not far off from our own.
With the explosion of geek culture and comics readership in recent years, there’s been a concurrent increase of interest in craft brewing, and Alpha King 1: A Murder in Munster (Image Comics, 5/4/2016), written by Nick Floyd of Three Floyds Brewing and Brian Azzarello, noted for his work for DC, brings these phenomena together deftly.
I was actually kind of surprised to learn that Airboy is an actual Golden Age character. I’d simply assumed (having never heard of him before) that he was a stand-in, a character that might as well have been a Golden Age character but wasn’t, not really. But, he’s totally real – as real as a comic character can get, anyway.
The most recent issue of the Ed Brisson/Adam Gorham/Michael Garland series, The Violent, has arrived, and with it comes some bad news: This is nearly the conclusion of the series. In the backmatter of this issue, Brisson discussed the end of the series and its possible resurgence with crowdfunding, something that makes me both hopeful and very sad, as this is a series I have really enjoyed.
The second issue of the new Wic/Div arc is here, and so far, the arc’s title of “Rising Action” is more than living up to its name. There’s a frantic pace to this issue, and to the series as a whole, as the re-emergence of a thought-dead god makes their way back into the picture and causes a fissure between these beloved deities.
