A world of four color magic arrives every Wednesday.
Stories and adventures of heroes and villains, good versus evil.
Tales that entertain and excite by talented writers and artists.
Here are my thoughts Among The Panels.
Lumberjanes #6
Writer: Noelle Stevenson & Grace Ellis
Artist: Brooke A. Allen
Publisher: BOOM! Studios
Price: $3.99
Okay, so I have been behind the times lately. I have heard the buzz about Lumberjanes online and seen the art everywhere as of late but I was still reluctant to pick it up.
I had heard that it was one of the best comic for girls, pretty much ever. I know the comic book industry has been fighting hard to find burgeoning female market and exploit the hell out of it.
BOOM! is currently leading the way of making appealing content, not just for one side of the fence or the other, but instead making good comics that everyone can read and enjoy without taking into account their gender.
Lumberjanes is better than I expected and once again BOOM! has shaken my understanding of how comics can be made.
Having just caught up on Lumberjanes; I feel kind of bad that my first review is of issue 6 but I couldn’t keep my mouth shut! If you, like me, haven’t caught up let me give you a quick update. The story is about a rag-tag group of teenage girls that fight monsters while at an all girls summer camp.
There are tons of magical things going on in and around the camp. They have been attacked by 3 eyed monsters, fought living rock dudes in a cave, and one of them has been accused of being a magical beast by a Bear-woman. I know, it sounds awesome and it really is.
Coming off issue 5, where the girls fought off a pack of raptors, this issue is a little less out there. The campers have pretty much forgotten about the raptors and now are in the midst of playing and epic game of capture the flag. There were a few questions brought up in the previous issue about one of our girls named Jo, she is the semi-leader of our group. In this issue we get more information but leave more confused.
One of our villains from the previous issue is revealed to be Jo’s sister and that they know more about the magic going on than they want to admit. There is literally only one page that includes this idea and it is as quickly forgotten as it brought up.
Noelle and Grace slam out another great issue here. Their dialogue is still growing stronger with each issue and the catchphrases set up in the first few issues make you feel right at home on every page. They have managed to build a really awesome world around these girls and it’s accepting in every aspect. It’s just strong, different, and hard to ignore. Brooke’s art is also so strong and inventive that it keeps your eyes pleased from panel to panel.
Lumberjanes is paving the way for non-superhero based books. The only way that we, as comic book fans, can change the landscape of the industry is to support books like this. If we take it upon ourselves to champion books like this we can’t fail.
Score: 5 out of 5
Butterfly #1
Writer: Arash Amel & Marguerite Bennet
Artist: Antonio Fuso
Publisher: BOOM! Studios
Price: $3.99
Butterfly #1 was kind of a bummer. It was a black dot on the otherwise spotless record for me and BOOM! Studios.
First, I will talk about the good things this book did. I, personally, love comics that do a lot of narrative. I like it when most of the information I get comes from square boxes.
Butterfly #1 is all spelled out in this fashion.
It starts off really well. The images of a father teaching his daughter how to shoot while she is telling us about her past works really well to draw you in.
The rest of the plot is based around that same girl all grown up.
She is now a spy for some kind of organization and throughout her narrative we kind of find out that she might be getting set up for a murder or something. It’s kind of confusing. The layout of this comic is nice to look at and easy to read. Having said that I guess we should move onto the things it didn’t do well.
The writing in this book isn’t bad, but it really isn’t great. There just is not that much to go on. The narrative is so slow that I ended up tuning out while trying to mash my way through page after page of dullness. I just don’t understand how you can take a spy story and make it less exciting than watching water gather at the bottom of a bathtub. Finishing this book took a lot out of me and I was frustrated that this book even made it to print. It really felt like there we two brains trying to tell this story and the confusion comes in the form of poorly thought out plot devices. When the book shifts to another person’s narrative nearly at the end of the book it feels tacked on and maybe should have been included in a later issue. Since it tells some of the same events it would probably be better utilized as a flashback piece in a later book.
Okay, spies are cool and they usually kick a lot of ass. This spy however is boring and does nothing. She is brought to life by art that is just as boring. The color pallet used is mainly earth tones and shades of grey. That is not really the problem though, the main thing that hurts is that the style of the art is like if you were looking at really well defined art through the bottom of a beer bottle. There are panels that are so badly defined that I wasn’t immediately sure what I was even looking at.
It would be one thing for the art to be bad but the writing helps elevate it or the other way around but this book is hurt one both fronts.
Score: 1 out of 5
Roche Limit #1
Writer: Michael Moreci
Artist: Vic Malhotra
Publisher: Image Comics
Price: $3.50
Science fiction is coming back and comics like Roche Limit #1 help pad the growing landscape of awesome Sci-fi comics.
Roche Limit #1 is set on a small planet revolving around a space anomaly that is like a black hole except that it doesn’t suck in and destroy everything around it. This anomaly is called the Roche Limit and the planet that soars around it is called Disapter. This planet now houses a colony that is basically free of any kind of law and order. While digging into the planet to find water they discovered a new mineral that people now use to craft a drug coined as Recall.
Michael Moreci has sculpted a pretty amazing world for this story to thrive in. Opening the book with a long prologue helps catch up the reader on what’s different about this world compared to our own and it grabs you instantly.
We don’t really have a “main” character as you normally do in these types of books. We have a cop who is searching Disapter for her missing sister. While searching she enters a dive bar asking people if they have seen her sister when a scruffy looking guy comes to her aid. It turns out that he is one of the people who make the Recall drug. She reluctantly agrees to his help. He explains to her that his brother went missing when he was young and when he heard her sob story it stirred something inside him and he knew he had to help. Upon leaving his apartment they are accosted by a group of thugs trying to get the recipe for the drug. Our male lead then explodes a gas pipe in the hallway and they escape.
The story switches to a medical facility. This is where we see the missing sister being held in a cage. A no named scientist then explains that she has been chosen for some kind of experiment. We get all this wrapped around the images of beautiful and lifeless girl. The last page of the book leaves us with the image of two young people discovering some kind of glowing rock that has fallen planet-side.
This art in this book is matched wonderfully. The art itself isn’t the best thing you will ever see but it works really well to push this story along. It has an older art style that pairs nicely with the sci-fi theme of this book. The story reminds me of the original Total Recall, which does have a comic and they should have chosen Vic to do the art for.
Roche Limit #1 is one really well paced opening book that keeps you interested with interesting and well thought out art. Another great drop in the bucket that is sci-fi comics, I can’t wait for the second issue.
Score: 5 out of 5.
A Voice in the Dark: Get Your Gun #1
Writer: Larime Taylor
Artist: Larime Taylor
Publisher: Top Cow
Price: $3.99
A Voice in the Dark: Get your Gun is the eagerly anticipated follow up to 2013’s Kickstarted comic of the same name. Once again Larime Taylor astounds us with a fresh take on the serial killer/horror genre.
This book picks up right where the last book left off. Zoey is just coming down off of her second and third kills. She has just realized that she is, for all intents and purposes, a serial killer. She is a bit shaken by the fact that someone knows her secret who is also a serial killer. He witnessed her last killing and snapped a Polaroid to show her that he saw it.
The opening of this book shows us what is to come. Zoey and someone we don’t know are being held at gunpoint and are being coerced into confessing about the murders.
We quickly are taken back to where, Zoey is getting home from the latest set of killings. She slips up and loses one of her taped recording of her radio show that she was using as an alibi. She then gives us a play by play of the week following her killing spree and she explains that she is feeling better since taking the lives of two and three. On the night of her next radio show her stalker calls in and they banter themselves into meeting in person. Once they meet it is revealed that Rio, the other serial killer on campus, was slightly abused as a teenager by a bunch of rich white girls. He managed to hold his rage in until he went away to college and unleashed it on a seemingly innocent substitute. Zoey doesn’t seem to be phased at all by this and that’s pretty much where this issue ends.
Larime has crafted a really spooky story here. I know he wants Zoey to not be depicted as a psychopath or a sociopath but her non emotional response to Rio’s reasoning for killing makes me feel like he is losing touch with that. I understand that she feels and that takes it away but there is still something very much wrong with her. This book creeped me out and that’s hard to do.
If you don’t know already the write/art and overall brain of this book has a debilitating genetic disorder that makes it so that he has no use of his arms. He writes, draws, and colors this book entirely with his mouth. Even without this knowledge the art in this book is wonderful. Digital art is hard to do well in the comic medium most of the time. I think that when art is done digitally it loses some of the heart that we all know and love about classic comic books but this book defies that. It’s really solid and it evokes the right amount of emotion from you.
Seeing as how this is a darkly themed book the art needs to do the same and it really does. It helps to have one person on the creative end of a book so all things fit into place as they should. This is an amazing feat of comic book genius.
Score: 4 out of 5
Edge of Spider-Verse #3
Writer: Dustin Weaver
Artist: Dustin Weaver
Publisher: Marvel
Price: $3.99
Another issue and another yet another Spider-Verse; this time is vaguely Japanese?
I say this because all of the names in this universe are sort of Asian. Our Spider-Man in this universe is named Dr. Aaron Aikman, who works for the Ikegami Corporation, and who also gives us an almost unstoppable villain named Naahmurah.
Dr. Aaron obtained his spider-powers the old fashion way; science. He is a genetic scientist that was trying to find a way to splice cloned spider DNA into other DNA and of course he tried it on himself. Much like other iterations of Spider-Man this one was given immense strength, the ability to climb walls, and the knowledge to build silk webbing.
He was pushed into the role of the hero by a human turned robot from the outskirts of Jupiter. He seemingly killed this foe, named Redeye, in his first battle as a hero. After that villains just started to appear, like they do, and he was from then on a full fledged Spider-Man.
Over the first half of this comic is pure exposition and narration. I really enjoyed this. It felt like a really good intro to this universe even though we would only be getting into for a short time. Also Dustin Weaver used the old Marvel trading card templates to explain who our villains are. I thought this was a nice touch and showed that he was a true fan.
His choice to make this Spider-Man half mechanized worked really well in this universe. His first villain being half mechanical as well was a good style choice. The fact that he has jet boosters on his feet didn’t retract from him being Spider-Man, I honestly think it makes him a little cooler.
One other aspect of this comic that I liked was it was dark. The story is based around the brain death of a small child who’s mother, the head of Ikegami, pretty much lost everything to try and revive her. In her efforts to try and bring her daughter back she unknowingly released demon-esk creators from an alternate universe who were now taking other peoples bodies to build a nightmare army.
I like my comics dark and it was really cool to see a sad story where nothing good goes right for a Spider-Man.
Dustin Weaver had a great idea for this book and I think he knocked it out of the park. This series just keeps getting better and the set up for the great Spider villain is making me anxious. Marvel is doing a great job roping me into being excited about Marvel books!
I have been waiting for something awesome to come along and bring me back and as of late they have been wooing me hard. Keep em coming Marvel!
Score: 4.5 out of 5
