May 27, 2010
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The Sinister Truth: MK Ultra
One teeny tiny thing before I start unreservedly praising this fantastic graphic novel: Jason and Aaron, put your names on the cover. This is a graphic novel, you’ve earned it! Just saying. OK, who out there loves a good conspiracy theory? How about if that theory is backed up with so much factual documentation that it stops being a theory and instead becomes the hilarious truth? This comic tells the tale of one of the many assassination attempts of Fidel Castro over the years by the U.S. government, otherwise known as the keystone cops of assassins, or at least that’s how I think of them for botching literally hundreds of chances to kill the guy. Botched assassination attempts include poisoning Fidel’s wetsuit, an exploding cigar (seriously), and an exploding conch shell. Those are only the most ridiculous ones of the bunch, there were hundreds more. Anyway, this comic tells the tale of an attempt to use mind-controlled CIA agents to poison his shoes and pump LSD into the air of a television studio while Fidel was giving a speech. The idea was that his subjects would revolt upon seeing Fidel dancing around on burning feet, blasted out of his mind on LSD and having his beard fall off from the poison. The trouble was that the man in charge of this project regularly used LSD himself in huge quantities which, when looked at through the lens of modern living, is one of the crazier things you’ll ever hear. The “training” of these agents involved breaking them down into tiny quivering pieces, so naturally things started to go wrong with one of the agents. They were able to “see” through the eyes of the agent while the doctor was controlling them (I’m assuming this is artistic license on the part of Jason and Aaron, but with so many insane things being true in this story it’s hard to tell), and the doctor responds to problems in the mission by taking more LSD. The story on the Cuban side was a comedy of errors: the main agent got drunk and blabbed his story to a woman at a bar (forcing him to kill the woman, then everybody else in the bar to prevent his story from getting out), then he killed a maid because he thought in his manic state that she was a spy (turns out she was, but that was just blind luck), and he finally killed the other two agents that were assisting him because the voices in his head told him to. Not a good start to the mission, granted, but if only got worse once he finally made his way to the television studio. While putting the LSD into the air vents he accidentally set it off, getting a highly concentrated blast (far more concentrated than what he took during his “training”) right in the face, so naturally the doctor in charge of the mission took an equal blast to be on the same page as the agent. The doctor freaks out, burns all the files and destroys the monitoring apparatus, which sets the agent loose during a crucial fight with Fidel. I’m right on the edge of revealing everything about this comic. It’s in the historical record and all, but I learned some new things about Fidel during this comic and I thought I was pretty caught up on all that nonsense. Sure, we know it’s a fascinating historical story, but do these two pull off interpreting it? In a word: yes. Yes, they do. Jason has clearly researched the hell out of this (he even reprinted a few memos from back in the day, and most pages have a historical footnote of some kind), and Aaron was the perfect choice to show these characters devolve into hallucinating puddles of goo, not the mention the fine work he does on this large cast of characters. The price is a little steep at $11.95, but the packaging is gorgeous and these two clearly put some serious time and effort into this. Check it out, learn a little something about American history just in case you made it to 2010 and still think that the U.S. can do no wrong. $11.95
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Posted by Kevin
May 26, 2010
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Lynchpin #1
It’s often baffling to me that I don’t see more comics dealing with really serious subjects (genuine personal trauma, the wars this country is involved in, the ridiculously high unemployment and awful housing situation). Sure, sometimes serious things are addressed, but it’s usually under the guise of a great personal hardship for the creator, not so much how those things are serious problems on their own and how maybe we as a society should start thinking about addressing them. There are exceptions (hi Dan Archer!), but they’re few and far between. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that this comic (which I thought would be in the “humor” pile by that cover) is a brutally honest take on sexual assaults on women. Well, one woman in particular, and even after 8 years she’s still changing the names of the people who attacked her just in case their threat to kill her family was serious. Its horror lies in how common this situation is, and in this case the young woman in question was 15 and too sick to stay at school. She felt lousy and just wanted to lay down, but was sidetracked on her way to the office by three young men who knew exactly where to hang out: on the stairs near the section of the school that was always empty in the afternoons. Things started off with the woman in question thinking the guys were just joking around with her before quickly realizing that they were deadly serious and that she was in real trouble. Luckily for her a friend was supposed to meet her after class and they had raised enough of a commotion that he was able to come to her rescue, but it was a near thing and it still scarred her for life. W.B. throws one fact in here that I hadn’t heard, and it’s astonishing: when the author of The Vagina Monologues was researching her book she interviewed a number of women, and she talked to over 300 of them before she finally found one who had never, in any way, been sexually assaulted. W.B. put it best: “It makes me ashamed to be a man, but damned glad to be one.” His technique in telling this story was brilliant as well, as it was told basically as a story that the young woman was relating to him, but with her making asides throughout the story and him adding his own opinions. After all, while it felt suffocatingly near to me, it was old news to the young woman and she had time in telling the story to relate where she was at that point in her life sexually (nowhere) and what she’s learned in the meantime. It was a horror story brilliantly told, and kudos to the man for putting it out there. W.B. was apparently a guitarist for 20 years before putting this out, so for anybody who was thinking that a guy with that background would be stereotypically air-headed: wrong. There’s also a tiny story at the end detailing a conversation with his girlfriend about what order you take the pieces of gum in those pop-out holders; a welcome piece after the seriousness of the rest of the comic. I’m not sure what else this guy has up his sleeve but it’s pretty clear that he wants to try some new things, and I’m genuinely curious to see what he does next. This isn’t an easy read but is an important one, and well worth the effort to hunt down. $4
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Posted by Kevin
May 25, 2010
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Future
You all know the drill on these I Know Joe Kimpel anthologies by now, right? 4 artists giving their take on whatever the title of that anthology happens to be? OK, just checking, don’t get all offended or anything. This one is about the nebulous concept of the future, so these four are able to take the concept and veer off into wild directions. Jennifer Tong starts off with the highlight of the issue (i.e. the one I was sure that I was following correctly), dealing with two people who are chatting online, having holographic interactions, before finally deciding to meet in person. I love this one because if you took away the bells and whistles (holograms, a device to let them fly) the personal side of it happens every day. Jason Overby is up next with an illustrated poem about needing to keep moving to stave off death, or at least that’s what I took away from it. Emily Wieja then has the most interpretive piece of the bunch, dealing with pollution, a bird eating a worm, an eagle and… aw hell, I don’t know. I’m still trying to piece that one together. To me it was a bunch of pretty pictures that didn’t add up to anything resembling the story title (“Mirror”), but sometimes I get stuck in my literalist ways. Finally there’s a silent piece by Jose Luis Olivares in which a tiny man clothed only in grapes tries to give a pretty flower away after witnessing the true horror of the world and, after a series of hardships, finally meets a woman that’s about 50% boob. Hey, I didn’t draw her, and maybe I only noticed because I’m a creep, but they were pretty hard to miss. Also pretty harmless, as they were on a tiny adorable cutout woman. Oh, and I should also point out that the actual cover is a bit shinier than the sampled image, in case you like shimmering gold on your comics. All told I’d say they have better anthologies available, but there’s enough good stuff in here to make it worth a look. $7
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Posted by Kevin
May 24, 2010
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Power Out
Hey, shouldn’t this have a “Volume 1” on here somewhere? That’s right, I’m starting off with a quibble. Still, it’s easy to get the impression that this would be self-contained (as the vast majority of small press graphic novels are just one volume), and that is very much not the case with this one. This is the story of a 14 year old boy (Justin) and his slightly older sister (Carrie). OK, it’s really mostly about Justin. Anyway, things start off with their parents heading out of town on a cruise for a week, but leaving the kids behind because Carrie needs to work on her college applications and Justin won’t go without her. Justin has some serious issues, which are only hinted at this time around, and our first impression of him is as a video game zombie, an impression he doesn’t do much to dispel… until the power goes out. What, you didn’t know that was coming from the title? I’m skipping over some stuff (Carrie throws a party, Justin just wants to be left alone, Carrie ends up going away with these people she just met to a beach house for the weekend, leaving Justin alone), but I’m trying to focus on Justin here. Oh, and we also see an old postcard to Justin from Carrie, with the reason he wasn’t allowed to go on that trip intriguingly crossed out. If Nathan was trying to make that mysterious but readable he failed, if he was trying to pique my interest without giving it all away yet, well, kudos. Once the power goes out and stays out, Justin is forced to wander out into the real world and he isn’t at all prepared for what he finds there. The rest of the book is a mad mix of him being talked at by his (attractive, close to his age and unable to speak English) neighbor, wandering off and waking up at the local clock festival, and being so overwhelmed with the huge mass of people that he runs off into the forest by himself. I’m coming very close to giving away the whole book again, so that’s it for the descriptions. I will say that this depiction of a disconnected 14 year old was perfect, with his main contact with the outside world being a video game hint board, and the perpetual deadness of his eyes that start to show signs of coming back to life. What I loved about this book was that nothing was ever neat and easy, and at every chance Nathan had to send the story into a cliched direction he zoomed off the other way, while keeping everything as true to reality as possible. Believe me, that’s not an easy line to walk. Everybody out there probably already knows about this guy (what with the Xeric award and everything), but in case you’re like me and hadn’t heard about this, it’s worth picking. Nathan even has a deal going on at his site at the moment, so if you hurry you can get a free watercolor if you order it from him, which I was nice enough to link to in the title. You’re welcome! $9.95
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Posted by Kevin
May 23, 2010
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Marked #2 (with art by Jeremy Johnson)
It may have finally happened: Brian may have finally spread himself too thin with the pile of minis he’s putting out on a constant basis. I thought this issue was a little too pat, wrapped up a little too neatly. Things start off with a recap of the last issue (Brian has always gotten this right), then our hero Mark the former demon hunter (called out of retirement in the last issue) wakes up after taking a beating from his own inner demon, which he had to unleash to defeat the other demons. The issue is a mad dash from there, with the demon killing Mark’s girlfriend in his apartment, Mark getting a train ticket to get out of town (as he understands completely that “my inner demon came to life and killed my girlfriend” wouldn’t fly with the cops), and the demon confronting Mark at the train station. I’m still having trouble putting my finger on exactly what it was that felt… less in this issue than in the rest of Brian’s work. The ending was very neat, sure, especially when you consider how much trouble Mark knew it would be to release his demon and the relative ease with which their fight went (not to give anything away or anything, even though I kind of just did. Dammit).  With his consistent record of quality he’s earned the benefit of the doubt from me, so I’m guessing this inner demon thing will get explained more fully in future issues, or maybe he’ll just ditch this series entirely and focus on the half dozen other series he writes. Still, there’s some great artwork by Jeremy on these tiny pages, and the story all by itself was engaging. There was just something a little bit lacking. Yes, I know that as a reviewer I’m supposed to be able to pinpoint exactly what that is. Maybe Brian’s desire to have all the issues be at least mildly self-contained, which caused the fight to wrap up too quickly? That’s a noble goal, to keep everything satisfying if a person only buys one issue. Ack, I give up. There’s also the possibility that something in my brain wasn’t firing properly today; keep in mind that’s always a possibility with these reviews. $1
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Posted by Kevin
May 22, 2010
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Candlakare Mardommar: Dental Nightmares
I’ve done it! I’ve finally managed to find the quickest mini comic to read in history! This is not to say a bad thing about the content of the comic (which I’ll get to in a minute), but wow, this thing is short. There’s a four page wordless story, followed by a couple of rough sketches of two of the four pages, and that’s it for the comic. Just a note: rough sketches in such a tiny thing are completely unnecessary. Just my opinion, but I would have preferred a tiny bit more content. So how about the story? The cover gives it away, except the plural aspect of it is misleading: this is about just one dental nightmare. An alien (not pictured in the sample) dreams he/she/it is in a dentist’s office, the dentist turns into an evil monster, and then the alien wakes up. The end! Um, spoiler alert. The funny part about this is that I went to his (her?) website before writing this and there are at least a few freebies up there with more content than this comic. For all that complaining about the tininess of this thing, it’s a funny piece. It will take you between 10 and 20 seconds to read it, but it’s not bad at all. The website has full color, so naturally it looks a little better, but I’d be very curious to see a bigger story with this artwork. Worth checking out, sort of, or you could just read the samples at his/her site and go from there. No price, but I’m going with $1.
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Posted by Kevin
May 21, 2010
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Turtleneck Boy #6
Well, technically you could say that Suzanne is mostly just the editor of this comic, but you know what I mean by that header. Hey, you could be in the next issue of this if you wanted: make a 1-4 page comic (sized to fit in a mini), and include Turtleneck Boy in it. Everything else in the story is up to you, and Suzanne puts these out approximately every time she gets enough stories to do so, so why not make a tiny comic and send it to her? It’s not like the art has to be immaculate or anything, as at least two of the stories in here were very minimalistic. So how about the stories? Suzanne has that awesome cover (I like her back cover even better, but I’m not giving it all away for free here) and a couple of short pieces in back, neither of which have Turtleneck Boy in them. Is that legal, to skip the requirements for your comic if you’re the editor? As far as I know there are no police for such matters, so it is apparently allowed. Other pieces include Erich Sundermann with TB’s (I’m shortening it from now on) depression, Brien Wayne Powell with a cranky TB, Todd Swanson with a slightly more hopeful take on the character, and Aaron Trudgeon has a meandering piece that wanders into all sorts of things in a few short pages. It’s a pretty good mix up pieces, although I am struck by the fact that I didn’t get anything that was JUST from Suzanne at SPACE this year. That’s what I get for only stopping briefly and asking for her new comics instead of my usual leisurely browsing. $1
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Posted by Kevin
May 20, 2010
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Clyde the Redneck #1
There’s a comic strip in The Other Paper (based in Columbus Ohio), the name of which escapes me because I never bothered to read the ugly thing. Full disclosure here: it’s an uphill battle to get me to read newspaper comic strips, even though I have managed to find a few over the years that are pretty funny. Anyway, I could never be bothered with that particular strip because it was a clip-art thing: they would use the same panel for the whole strip, fill in the word balloons and (one assumes) wrap it up with a joke. That one, at the very least, had the decency to change the image every week. This is a collection of four panel strips, all told with clip-art, all using that profoundly ugly image from the cover. Stephen starts off thanking a bunch of conservative luminaries, but a quick glance at his website shows that he’s not really a fan of those nutbags. OK, so the comic looks terrible. What about the writing? It’s OK. It’s the same format for the whole thing of course: first panel with only a title, next two set up some sort of a punchline, and then the punchline is delivered. Topics include being followed too closely, waiting for McCain to get elected, seeing a lot of stickers on a car, falling in love with a country singer on the radio, yelling at an Obama bumper sticker, and how high schools dress slutty. As humor is subjective, I will only say that I thought it was significantly more stupid than funny. It looks like he has other, better (?) books available, so here’s hoping that I picked up one of those comics in my mad dash through SPACE, as I’d hate to think this lazy mess is the best this guy has to offer. $1
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Posted by Kevin
May 20, 2010
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Teen Angst Comix! #3
Oof. I try to start these things off with something positive or, if I know it’s going to be a positive review, to start them off with at least one thing that could have been improved from the comic. Just a little something to try to make the comics world a better place. But with this one… oof. OK, I’m sure that Mark is a perfectly wonderful person, and I’m sure that he has better comics than this out there, but this one was bad. The art is mostly decent, and that’s the end of my nice comments. This is a tiny thing about, well, teen angst. What’s the phrase? No subtext, all text? That’s the case here. It’s a simple gag: the first page has a teen complaining about something (parents wanting the kid to get a job to pay for gas and insurance and then they’ll be willing to buy a car, wishing for more excitement at school, and being annoyed at having been handed everything she ever wanted) and the second page has the kid acting out, either shooting up the place he/she isn’t happy with or shooting themselves full of drugs. Yep, I get it, kids today have no appreciation whatsoever. It’s a rare comic that manages to make me feel like I’ve been lectured when it’s only 8 pages long, but this one managed. And there’s the fact that this was the third issue. Were the other two just like this? Talk about overkill. Again, I’m sure Mark takes care of orphans in his spare time and I’m an awful person for not appreciating this, but really, being bashed over the head with one of the more obvious jokes in the world is always annoying. Here’s hoping for better things, as I had no problem with his art and just think that it would be better served in a comic with a story. At least it’s cheap… $.75
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Posted by Kevin
May 19, 2010
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The Secret History of the Ineffables #2
Perhaps you’re still undecided on The Ineffables in general, or perhaps you’ve somehow managed to avoid reading about them at some point on this site over the years. Fair enough. I would recommend that you embiggen that sample below and give it a good look, as it deals with an old team of Ineffables and their time spent trapped in a force field. It has only the barest relevance to the rest of the issue, but it’s such a slice of perfection that I couldn’t pass up using it for the sample. As for the rest of the issue, it’s more of the science-based mayhem you’ve come to know and love, or at least you’ve come to know and love it if you’ve been paying attention. This issue shows why young Abe Lincoln was kicked off the team ages ago (his methods were too extreme for the team), follows the current team as they try to locate the stolen Schrodinger’s Cat (which has a unique quantum nature that seems to see through realities), shows us a few more dead Ineffables (as the dead are still running loose from the first issue of this series), has the fight the whole world has longed to see (Abe Lincoln vs. Uncle Sam), and has Abe Lincoln following the team into the realm of the dead in the only way he knows (and I loved the fact that his beard reappeared before the flesh on his face when he made it to the afterlife). This is a team of superheroes in only the loosest sense, as their “powers” are based in abstractions and raw science (I don’t think any of them other than Abe could throw a decent punch), but instead of being some sort of drawback it always ends up being the only way this team can function: through using their brains, even though the brain of Chet leaves a little bit to be desired. But hey, it only adds to his humanity. The only complaint I have is that the art seemed rushed at times in the comic, as his linework was stronger in previous issues, but it’s not a constant problem, just a little thing I picked up here and there, and only noticeable because it’s been so great in the past. Wait, was that a complaint or not? Sort of. Anyway, the point of all this is that if you ever see Craig at a con, ask him what he thinks the best self-contained Ineffables story is, buy it and be impressed. Or if you’re rich and see him at a con, just buy the stack of comics he has available, there is very little in this universe that will disappoint. $4
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Posted by Kevin
May 18, 2010
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The Death and Damnation of Pretty Jeff
Here’s to taking the mystery out of comic titles! Seriously, you already have a pretty good clue as to what this comic is about. “Pretty Jeff” (a stand-in for the creator Jeff, or a huge coincidence?) is riding a roller coaster, said roller coaster crashes to the ground, and he “wakes up” to see death hovering over him. From there we’re treated to exactly how pathetic the life of Pretty Jeff was (death was watching for his whole life but ended up just cutting and pasting the same pictures of him playing video games and watching tv as the recap of his life), the reason why Pretty Jeff was going to hell, the suggestion box in hell, watching the big entertainment in hell (watching Hitler get tortured in various ways), meeting Satan and learning the conditions of his captivity. These were clearly done as either daily or weekly strips, as they all have the same format and all end in some form of a punchline. Still, kudos to Jeff for keeping the “previously on” recaps short and having them make sense in the context of each comic. This comic also switches over to full color after the first half of the book (guessing that’s when he changed the strip online and kept it for the collected edition, but who knows?), and ends on a two part story that you fold down. That part of things is an unsightly mess, but as the glue only makes the back cover look all crumpled and weird it’s not the biggest deal in the world. So: a funny collection of short pieces that add up to a greater whole, combined with an excellently anti-climatic ending. No sir, no bitching from me at all. No price, but as this gets all colorized about halfway through I’m guessing $4.
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Posted by Kevin
