Comics (2221)
Who needs a whole seat when just the edge will do?
Mark Millar sets the galaxy on fire once again with the newest issue of Empress. Having been separated from the children by slavers, Dane, Emporia, and Tor struggle to get out of a tricky situation, while the kids have to look to their own devices to figure a way out of their predicament. This is the most action-packed issue yet, which is saying something if you’ve been reading the series, and the “Hell Yeah” moments are riddled throughout an issue which best exemplifies what we’ve seen so far.
You can’t take the sky from me.
I know I’ve gotten the Browncoats’ attention, and Warship Jolly Roger should have it, as well. Spinning a tale of redemption and daring do, Sylvain Runberg has gathered the kind of core characters that can interest and fascinate anyone, while Miquel Montllo brings animation-caliber artwork to the game and gives it a beautiful and moving sense of life. Four convicts who owe nothing to each other must find a way to survive and even thrive while they deal with the fallout from their lives and their removal from it.
For the last several months, Cullen Bunn has teased his story in a couple of different directions. First, it was Emmy helping a family in a house that was quite literally alive. Then, Bernice - Emmy’s neighbor and friend - took her first steps down the path of becoming a sort of mystical snake charmer. In the last couple of issues, Emmy has been introduced to the extended family of her mother. How all these threads will combine, I don’t know, but Bunn is building towards something that feels epic, especially if the last page of this issue holds true to the upcoming conflict. Or Bunn could pull the rug out from under us and go a completely different, yet amazing, direction. He’s good at that.
I’m back and forth on this new storyline that brings together the worlds of Aliens, Predator, and Prometheus. Prometheus the movie was ambitious, but deeply flawed, and the first Prometheus comic book took that ambition and filled in a lot of the gaps. It got rid of the more convoluted aspects and made the mythology terrifying. This new storyline by Dan Abnett seems to excel when the characters are in the heat of battle. Issue #2, when our band of humans suddenly find themselves surrounded by Aliens, was really exciting, but I don’t know if Abnett really knows what to do with the Engineers, the “gods” from the Prometheus storyline.
At the end of Lumberjanes / Gotham Academy #2, we had left Jen, Olive, Professor MacPherson, and Rosie participating in the strangest Sweet Sixteen dinner party ever, and the balance of the Lumberjanes and Gothamites were gathered outside the party venue, ready to break in to rescue them.
I need to preface this with a huge disclaimer: I’m a HUGE fan of Sons of Anarchy. I binge watched the entire series in a few short weeks in order to watch the final season live. Then, I watched it all again, hoping to catch things I missed the first time. Like so many, I exalted when the “real” bad guys got theirs and I felt the pain when the anti-heroes of SAMCRO each went to meet Mr. Mayhem.
Killing Hope is the story of Hope, a young Native American woman fleeing her reservation after everyone she meets begins trying to kill her.
S—t, allow me to introduce Fan.
With Flak gone and Davey running the show, we return to the prize jewel of the mighty, bloated, and downward-sliding empire, NeoTokyo. Having reduced its natural splendor to a glaring, glittering nightmare, the march of the technology has finally covered the world. With her loss recent in her mind and her body dealing with the fallout of that encounter, as well, it's time for all the chips to be laid out in this penultimate issue.
The epic pairing of multiple Eisner Award-winning writer Ed Brubaker and Eisner Award-winning artist Sean Phillips, on the heels of their well-received limited series, The Criminal, really went dark with their latest offering from Image, Kill or Be Killed. The pair, who have won Eisners separately and together, were joined by colorist/cover artist Elizabeth Breitweiser to create the story of anti-hero Dylan,whose tumble into self-loathing turns him into an avenging angel.
Well, sorta.
So, this is the end.
Stephen Hawking has warned that Singularity is coming, the defining moment where - if we continue to pursue AI - it will gain consciousness and propagate at a prodigious rate and basically follow its course of logic to become Ultron. Apocalypse by machine has been the basis of some great cyberpunk stories, most noticeably in The Matrix Trilogy, but Jordan Hart has added a new wrinkle to the trope: a man whose actions have placed him outside of society to begin with is now the last vestige of that society. When the machines took over, they left the artists - humans who could create something that the machines knew that they could not - and kept them to keep creating for the machines.
