Recently the Spider-Men miniseries (written by Brian Michael Bendis and pencilled by Sara Pichelli) from Marvel came to a close. The story featured a team-up of the current Ultimate universe Spider-Man (Miles Morales) and the regular series Spider-Man (Peter Parker).
While fighting Mysterio, Peter Parker is thrown into the alternate dimension that is the Marvel Ultimate universe. In the Ultimate reality Peter Parker was killed by the Green Goblin while still a teenager. 13 year old Miles Morales winds up with similar spider powers and assumes the mantle of Spider-Man. The story of Spider-Men revolves around Parker trying to get back home and experiencing the alternate reality where he is dead and everybody knows his name. The comics are beautifully illustrated and the story is often funny. It turns out many of the characters are just interested in what their alternate universe selves are like. I give the five issue series a 7.5/10
This five issue comic series was published under the Marvel Max imprint (basically the R rated Marvel) in 2009. The story was written by Robert Kirkman (Astounding Wolf-Man, Invincible and The Walking Dead) and illustrated by Cory Walker (Invincible) and features an elderly Keene Marlow as The Destroyer.
The character of The Destroyer first appeared in the 1940's and this newer Marvel Max version picks up as though the original series never ended making Keene almost 100 years old. In the comic Marlow finds out from a doctor that his heart is bad and he doesn't have much longer to live. Destroyer sets out to kill all of his remaining enemies so that his wife and family can be safe when he is gone.
The comic is well written (as usual for Kirkman) and the art is clean and violent. I would recommend this to anybody who may have missed in back in 2009. I give The Destroyer a 9/10. I wish it were a continuing series.
Last week I decided to do a complete reading of the Vertigo series Y: The Last Man. Published in 60 issues from September 2002 to March 2008, Y is the story of a global instantaneous plague that kills all mammals with a Y chromosome (males) except for Yorick Brown and his capuchin monkey Ampersand.
After the sudden death of all men, society and infrastructure are in shambles. Yorick, along with Ampersand, the mysterious agent 355 and brilliant geneticist doctor Allison Mann must embark on an epic journey around the world to try and discover the cause and possible cure for the deadly plague, why Yorkick and his monkey managed to survive, and to find Yorick's fiancee Beth who was in Australia at the time of the disaster. All of this while being chased by an anti-male cult know as The Daughters Of The Amazon, the Israeli army, the Setauket ring, the Australian Navy, and a Japanese ninja named Toyota.
This series is truly exceptional. The characters are well developed and the art is clean and expressive. Y: The Last Man shows how different people cope with the disappearance of males from the planet and the possible extinction of the human race. There is a great mix of action, comedy, romance and tragedy.
A film has apparently been in development limbo for some time but unless it's at least a trilogy I believe that it can't do the comics justice. I think that Y: The Last Man would be much better suited as a television series just like The Walking Dead has been successfully adapted on AMC.
Even if you're not into the comic book or graphic novel medium I think that Y: The Last Man is good enough that I would recommend it to everybody. I give the complete series of 60 issues a 10/10.
If you don't want to track down all 60 comic issues the series is also currently available as ten trade paperbacks or as five deluxe editions.
I recently found this fan film for the comic series. The acting is pretty poor but it may be the only live action Last Man we get for a while.
Originally published in 1996 and 1997, Batman: The Long Halloween, is a 13 part limited series written by Jeph Loeb and illustrated by Tim Sale. The story takes place early in Batman's career (Harvey Dent has not yet become Two-Face) and features a great noir style murder mystery featuring the Holiday killer.
While Batman, Gordon and Dent try to solve the enigmatic Holiday killings we are also treated to scenes from Gotham's two biggest competing mob families and Bruce Wayne's life. Each of the 13 books takes place on a different holiday and features a different villain from batman's rogues gallery. We get to see appearances from Catwoman, Solomon Grundy, Joker, Mad Hatter, Calendar Man, Penguin, Scarecrow, Poison Ivy and Two-Face.
Jeph Loeb's story is tight and engrossing and Tim Sales art is original and cinematic, making great use of black and white, colour and shadows. I would not hesitate to suggest this series to any comic fan and give it a 9/10.
DC's Earth One series takes place in an alternate reality where the heroes are just starting out. The characters have no continuity with the regular DC universe so it's easy for new readers to jump into the story. The first Earth One comic released was Superman: Earth One in 2010 and now DC has just released Batman: Earth One in July of 2012.
This graphic novel written by Geoff Johns is a retelling of the classic batman origin story with some original character development and design. The book offers gritty new takes on an unprepared Batman, a reluctant Alfred, a downtrodden James Gordon, a famous Harvey Bullock and a successful Penguin.
The thing that really grabbed me about the graphic novel was the art. Artist Gary Frank did a wonderful job of bringing the characters to life. The world displays a gritty realism and the characters' faces express graphic pain, fear and anger.
While the art is great and the story is well written it is still a slightly updated version of the same Batman origin that has been endlessly reprinted. Batman: Earth One was a good read but because it still produces a sense of deja-vu I give it a 7/10.
This hardcover graphic novel from Dark Horse Comics with writer Jeff Jensen (from Entertainment Weekly) and artist Jonathan Case follows the investigation and subsequent 180 day interview of the Green River Killer, Gary Leon Ridgway, by detective Tom Jensen (writer Jeff Jensen's own father). For those who don't know, Gary Leon Ridgway was convicted of 48 murders and has confessed to almost twice that many. From the 1980's and into the 1990's he stalked the Seattle area and would strangle women and dump their bodies in the forests or overgrown areas.
The book tells an interesting story through the detective's struggles with the investigation, the subsequent interview, and his family life. The story is told through a series of scenes from the interview with Ridgway, and flashbacks to the past of the investigation. The art is simple and clean and conveys the emotions of the characters really well.
I would suggest checking this book out as the story is compelling, the simple art is often striking and it provides a different angle on the capture of one of America's most prolific serial killers. 8.5/10
The season finale of The Walking Dead aired on AMC last night and I am happy to say that the show is finally getting on track! This will probably contain some spoilers so don’t read any further if you haven’t seen the show yet. I have been following the Image comic books for a couple of years now (issue #95 should be coming out sometime next week) and when they announced The Walking Dead as a TV show for October 2010 I had some really high expectations. Until the last three episodes of season 2 my expectations were not met. The show has been slow, light on the zombies and some of the characters have been getting on my nerves (Shane, Andrea, Carol and Dale). In episode 11, “Judge, jury, Executioner”, I was happy to see Dale get torn apart in a field. In episode 12, “Better Angels”, Shane is finally killed by Rick (although I would have preferred if it went down like in the comics where Carl is the one to kill Shane).
Last night’s finale was full of zombies and action, low on the preaching, some people were lost and the best part is they introduced two of my favourite things from the comic series. Michone is shown briefly after saving Andrea in the woods and in the last shot of the show the camera pulls back to reveal a prison complex in the distance. The introduction of both Michone and the prison seem to indicate that the show is going to more closely follow the comics in the coming seasons. If this is true I hope to see The Governor possibly making an appearance next season to cause some real hell. I’m glad the season ended with a bang and it sucks that the show won’t be back till the fall.
I recently finished reading Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files Volumes 1-17 which covered 16 years worth of Judge Dredd/2000 AD comics and over 8000 pages!
For those unfamiliar with the character, the stories take place about 100 years in the future. Around the year 2070 a psychotic president of the United States starts World War III. The resulting Atomic War devastates the globe and only the Mega Cities with their laser defences were able to survive. The rest of the world has become a radioactive desert called the Cursed Earth which is populated by mutants and gangs. Up till this point the Judges were simply a powerful police force but the public demanded that the Judges take over the government. As a result, the Judges became the ruling dictators of the surviving Mega Cities. They are the police, judges, jury and sometimes executioners of the population they protect. Judges are trained from the age of 5 till the age of 20 in the hardest school on earth before they can become a full Judge.
Judge Joe Dredd is the toughest of the Judges (think RoboCop meets Dirty Harry meets John McClane) and is a direct clone of the original Chief Judge Fargo. Armed with a gun that fires selectable regular, incendiary, heat seeking, armour piercing and ricochet bullets called the Lawgiver and a motorcycle equipped with cannons and artificial intelligence called the Lawmaster, Dredd travels around Mega-City One sending perps to the Iso-Cube or to Resyk (body recycling plant where all the dead are sent). He never takes off his helmet, smiles or cracks a joke and he arrests and sentences people like it’s going out of style. A case of jaywalking can get you 12 months in the Iso-Cube!
Over the sixteen years worth of stories that I just completed the future looks like hell. There is a <10% employment rate and because of the lack of direction people feel, crime runs rampant. Disasters also seem to run rampant: Mega-City One suffers a robot rebellion, a crazy Chief Judge who sentences the entire population to death (alphabetically), an all out war between the various Mega-City blocks, The Apocalypse War between Mega-City One and East-Meg One (Russia) which killed off half of the city’s 800 million person population, Dark Judges from another dimension where life is a crime take over the city’s Judges and sentence the entire population to death, and Judgement Day where a necromancer revives all of the earth’s dead as a zombie army and billions of people are killed. Each time Dredd comes to the rescue.
I’d recommend this series to anybody. The longer stories are epic in scale and the single issue stories can be silly, sad, satirical, badass and everything in between. The different artists and writers who have worked on the books are also exceptional. Among my favourite artists were Brian Bolland, Simon Bisley, and Glenn Fabry who all brought a different flavour to the character.
On a related note, the small comic publisher IDW (who currently publishes the amazing Locke & Key series and the ongoing TMNT) has just announced that it will be releasing a monthly Judge Dredd book sometime in the future. Also, this September a new Dredd movie is going to be released. The film stars Karl Urban (Bones from the Star-Trek re-boot) and is written by Alex Garland who also wrote 28 Days Later. From what I have read the movie is supposed to be quite violent (exploding heads and people chopped in half) and I can only hope it will make people forget about the crappy Stallone version from 1995. There is a screenplay floating around but I don’t want to read it before the movie comes out. Many people are saying the story is like Die Hard in the future which is fine with me because I love Die Hard.
