Dave's Comicbook Capsules Et Cetera
Generally Monthly Picks and Pans of Comics and Related Media
Standard Disclaimers: Please set appropriate followups. Recommendation does
not factor in price. Not all books will have arrived in your area this month.
An archive can be found on my homepage,
http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/Rants My house is now level and my bank account noticeably lighter.
Items of Note (strongly recommended or otherwise worthy): Batman: Wayne
Family Adventures vol 4
In this installment: Aquaman the Lost Kingdom, X-Men 97, Please Don't
Tell My Parents I Saved The World Again, Rising Tides (Capes book 1),
Adventure Finders Book 3 Chapter 18, Delicious in Dungeon vol 1, Easygoing
Territory Defense by the Optimistic Lord: Production Magic Turns a Nameless
Village into the STRONGEST FORTIFIED CITY vol 2, Chainsaw Man vol 15, I'm In
Love With The Villainess vol 6, Go Go Loser Ranger vol 10, Happy Kanako's
Killer Life vol 7, Mr. Villain's Day Off vol 4, Batman: Wayne Family
Adventures vol 4, Fantastic Four #18-19, Vengeance of the Moon Knight #3-4,
Gargoyles #12 (of 12), Vampirella/Dracula Rage #5 (of 6), Vampirella
#667-668.
"Other Media" Capsules:
Things that are comics-related but not necessarily comics (i.e.
comics-based movies like Iron Man or Hulk), or that aren't going to be
available via comic shops (like comic pack-ins with DVDs) will go in this
section when I have any to mention. They may not be as timely as comic
reviews, especially if I decide to review novels that take me a week or two
(or ten) to get around to.
Aquaman the Lost Kingdom: DC/WB - Before I get into the problems with
this movie, here's a good bit. Orm (Ocean Master) really got done well by
the writers this time. I barely remembered he was IN the first movie, where
he was just sort of a generic heavy. Here we get a lot more character
development for him, and for his relationship with the brother he dreaded one
day having. One running gag was that it'd look like he was about to be the
butt of a joke, and then he ended up having a good time. Okay, on to the
problems. The FX scream "FX workers need a union." So much stuff that
looked like it was done on the cheap with crunch time looming, and then given
excessive glow effects in an attempt to distract from the quality issues.
The story had the usual DCCU problem of wanting the payoff without doing any
setup. It felt like we'd skipped an entire movie, skimming over a bunch of
stuff in opening narration so they could get to the Big Event That Changes
Everything. There's a mysterious Lost Seventh Kingdom that got wiped from
history, oooh. Except we barely had it sketched out that Aquaman was running
a coalition of six kingdoms. They really needed an in-between movie in which
Aquaman struggles with the crown, manages to get grudging respect from some
of the factions while pissing off others (there's a barely-seen figure who
we're told will take over executive power of Aquaman steps out of line, it'd
be nice if they were more than Generic Political Interferer #24 from central
casting). Would pushing this back to third have made it necessarily better?
Maybe not, but skipping the middle certainly didn't HELP. Very mildly
recommended, mostly for the Orm scenes. Price varies by format and store,
also available on Max I believe.
X-Men 97: Marvel/Disney+ - They have ten episodes to adapt major
storylines spanning about a decade of comics (mostly stuff that happened in
comics after 1996, but they squeeze in a version of LifeDeath in which
Storm's powers are taken away by the X-Cutioner at Magneto's trial in the
Hague...yeah, it's all kinda blenderized like that). This season relies a
LOT on the assumption that viewers have read all the comics, and they can
just sort of make reference to a storyline and that's enough to get all the
emotional impact from it. Where this hit hardest for me was when they got to
stuff after I stopped paying much attention to X-overs, and my reaction was
frequently, "Who is this, and why am I supposed to care?" This is
hypercompressed storytelling, much like the old joke about prisoners telling
jokes by just listing the number of a known joke. There's some cool visuals,
and they do earn some of their story beats (especially regarding Rogue), but
ultimately it was fan service (not that kind, mostly, although there is
Magneto in a speedo). I know a lot of people who really enjoyed this season,
but for me it was mostly just okay, and that mostly because I had read most
of the relevant comics and it was nice to see those stories animated, even if
it was just a sort of highlight reel. Season 2 is coming, and will likely
cover a bunch more stuff that I never read. So, a recommendation? If you
like 90s-style animation, it's a modern take on the style that works well.
If you read most of the X-Men comics from the late 80s through the 90s,
you'll get some high energy visual takes on some of those stories. But this
is really by fans of the era and for fans of the era, and if you're just
looking for something superhero-y, this might not be a good use of your time.
Streaming on Disney+.
Please Don't Tell My Parents I Saved the World Again: Crossroad Press -
This is a direct sequel to Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm Queen of the
Dead, starring Avery Special, but it also picks up a dangler from Please
Don't Tell My Parents I Work For a Supervillain. No Penny Akk this time
around, although her dad's in a few scenes. Avery's parents really don't
want her using her inherited necromantic prowess, and with good reason: every
known necromancer has gone evil at some point, sometimes very evil. (Avery's
grandmother's shade was a major secondary antagonist of QotD, for instance,
while the main antagonist was also a necromancer.) Much of this Richard
Roberts novel is an exercise in taunting Murphy, with "what could go wrong?"
always being answered pretty quickly. Something about the setting means that
the best of intentions have a distressing tendency to lead to supervillainy,
if only because there's often not enough time to do things the legal way. On
the other hand, the authorities seem to be aware of this, and there's a LOT
of latitude given to kids who end up doing the right thing in the wrong
way...something Avery really depends on in this book. In fact, it's
increasingly apparent (thanks to the clutch of newbie middle school supers
Avery ends up working with) that the new generation of superhumans are more
about the rules of the superhuman community than the laws of the country they
happen to live in. Granted, some of this is the inevitable "the authorities
won't listen to kids, so the kids have to go around the authorities" trope
that pops up in YA adventure and mystery stories, but it definitely feels
like the current crop of middle- and high-school supers are going to be
changing the world one way or another. The adults who seem most helpful are
the ones who can straddle the line between hero and villain, between law and
disorder. The more polarized role-following adults do try to help the kids
out (either out of altruism or cultivation of potential allies), but their
helpfulness is suspect. Oh, and along the way Avery gets to navigate the
pitfalls of her throuple relationship, including a sort of romantic impostor
syndrome. Definitely readable as a first exposure to the PDTMP universe, but
better if you at least read its two direct prequels first. Recommended.
Price varies by format (I got the ebook).
Rising Tides (Capes Book 1): Independently Published - With Astra's
story kinda wrapped up over in the Wearing the Cape books, this picks up a
new arc with a new protagonist. There's a little overlap, as the story
starts during the Attack on Chicago (Wearing the Cape book 8: Repercussions),
but after the protagonist's first serious action as a superhuman it moves
ahead ten months, putting the rest of the book after the end of the Wearing
the Cape timeline. Unlike the sort of benign neglect "Hope the supers sort
things out amongst themselves" approach of the Please Don't Tell My Parents
universe, the Capes setting has started going all Registration Act after
years of sensible light touch governance, so our new protagonist comes into
his powers just as it starts to look like revealing that fact could be a
death sentence (the main antagonists are a militant arm of the Humanity First
movement, and it's repeatedly brought up that anyone who goes on the registry
will have their info leaked to the Firsters sooner or later). It's a little
tricky keeping track of the timeline, because Harmon doesn't datestamp the
chapters (there's a wiki, but it's not a lot more than copying the appendices
of the Wearing the Cape books, with an aggressively spoiler-free vague
non-timeline). There was one scene I thought was something out of a Wearing
the Cape books from another viewpoint, but after a lot of searching around my
ebooks figured out that it was just another attack on the same location by
different people. Anyway, having a more outsider protagonist (compared to
"major member of a premier team who seems to be involved in everything" that
Astra is) means that the slightly lighter expository touch about the world
can be excused, because the point is that the characters here aren't supposed
to know as much as a long-time reader does. After some early fake-outs (as
in, character seems to be someone from Astra's circle, but turns out not to
be), the cast does gain a regular member from the earlier books, sort of.
But, again, the connection is left vague and if you hadn't read the relevant
previous books you wouldn't know where in Astra's life they come from. The
point of all this rambling is that it feels like Harmon wanted a clean break
but settled for a lot of gaps the reader is asked to ignore. A decent read,
but a step below the new Please Don't Tell My Parents book. Price varies by
format.
Doom Patrol S4 is unlikely to get finished any time soon, with all the
streaming stuff also eating into my viewing-while-paying-attention time.
Special Essay Section: Compare And Contrast Many Volumes Later
Okay, short essay time. While I haven't been reviewing every
installment here, I did do a compare and contrast of Richards's and Harmon's
books back when I reviewed the first installment of each
(
http://www.thefifth.world/2019/12/capes-vs-goggles-book-report.html). Now
that I've got a bunch more read, I have some additional thoughts.
First, to address some of the points from the old essay: DTMP-verse
still feels like it's more comfortable with romance and sexuality than the
Cape-verse, although Rising Tides does finally start getting more willing to
approach the topic. Neither has really fallen prey to the hazards I worried
about...the Cape-verse has definitely seen an escalation (lots of godlike
entities, including Santa Claus), but Rising Tides has recognized this and
performed a reset to focus on lower-power people dealing with living in that
world.
As for tone...the Cape-verse started darker, and has continued to go in
that direction, but DTMP has really felt more like, "The world is changing
with this generation, but not necessarily for the worse OR the better...just
different." Harmon's world had no supers at all until relatively recently
(the Event happened during Astra's childhood or maybe slightly before, IIRC),
and while it caught a break in terms of not immediately suffering society
collapse, they're now going through the whole Anti-Mutant Hysteria phase,
with lots of Marvel-style registration acts, picketers, anti-hero terrorism,
etc. Meanwhile, Roberts's world has had a history of powered folks going
back literally into prehistory, but a big event around a decade ago has
resulted in a rapid upswing in powers, threatening to upset the carefully
built equilibrium that had let society progress along lines similar to our
world. Back when supers were less common, it was relatively easy to keep
kids out of things until they were older, and the unwritten rules were good
enough...but all of the tweenaged and teenaged characters in the DTMP-verse
are overwhelming the system. These kids are important not necessarily
because of their powers or even the ways they save (or threaten) the world,
but because they are collectively going to set the tone for what it even
means to be a superhero or supervillain. In the Cape-verse, the struggle is
against the restrictions imposed from without...in the DTMP-verse it's
shaping up to be a purely internal debate, for these kids are immune to your
consultations as they try to change the world.
Between the two, I definitely prefer the tone and arc of the Don't Tell
My Parents books. The (Wearing the) Cape(s) books are good reads, but I
don't look forwards to them as much as I do the DTMP ones. As an aside, the
other single-creator superhero prose series I'm following, Blake Nelson's
Signalverse, I'd rank about at the level of the Capes books in terms of
craft, but the setting is more like DTMP in tone (being another "supers have
been around a while and society is kinda used to it" setting that more
explicitly maps onto the history of superhero comics than either of the other
two novel series).
Digital Content:
Unless I find a really compelling reason to do so (such as a lack of
regular comics), I won't be turning this into a webcomic review column.
Rather, stuff in this section will generally be full books available for
reading online or for download, usually for pay.
Adventure Finders Book 3 Chapter 18: Patreon.com - The big climactic
fight continues, with a bit of a meet-cute going on along the way, plus a
fair amount of angst as emotion-control spells wreak havoc among the good
guys. In some ways, the tide turns, and a lot of potential danglers get
snipped off before they can really start to dangle, but the big dragon is
still a Problem...it's just increasingly a problem for both sides. What side
is an ancient evil dragon on? Its own. Always. Recommended. $2/month or
more on Patreon.
Delicious in Dungeon vol 1: Yen Press - AKA Dungeon Meshi. So, this has
been big on social media lately, but I'd heard enough to be concerned it was
a bait and switch sort of story (I complained about those here last month).
I wanted to at least skim a copy before committing to buying, but none of the
places locally that carry manga had it in stock. However, the Amarillo
Public Library just got an e-comics service added, so I renewed my library
card and read this online. Since I did put this in the Digital Comics
section, I should briefly comment on Comics Pass. I used the desktop browser
version, which was generally okay, but sometimes would get hung up on loading
a page (possibly I was trying at a busy time), and if I came back after a
break it sometimes had to be reloaded to advance at all. I prefer hardcopy
when available, but this is acceptable when hardcopy is not available or I
don't want to wait for shipping. Anyway, if you've escaped hearing about
this series, it's your basic fantasy dungeoncrawl setting where the dungeon
is a mysterious cursed city (so anything that makes no physical sense can be
explained as part of the curse) trapped underground, with that curse being
the Chekov's Gun of the series. But for now, it focuses on a party of
adventurers who had a near wipe and now seek to go back in to recover the
body of the party leader's sister before it's too badly digested to
resurrect. But they're broke and have no food, so the leader convinces them
to try eating monsters. They are fortunate to run into a dwarf named Senshi
who's been eating monsters for ten years, so there's a lot of "book learning
vs. trial and error experience" here, with the book learning sometimes
proving useful. The leader, Laios, is very spectrum-coded, and has a special
interest in monsters...including how they taste. The party mage Marcielle is
the token "Ew, I will not eat green eggs and ham" character, while party
thief Chilchuck is more of a "Eh, I guess" middle ground on the topic. Each
chapter culminates in a recipe (that cannot actually be made) with
nutritional info, making this entire series start off as essentially one of
those longwinded recipe blogs that takes forever to get to the actual food.
This volume really only sets up the core cast and premise, I know from
fanworks and social media that there's a whole passel of secondary cast
members waiting to show up, plus the whole curse thing and possible
destruction of the world (I mean, you do not seal an entire city underground
for a thousand years if there ISN'T massive danger involved somewhere, yes?).
I'll be picking up the rest of the series, although might limit myself to a
few volumes a month rather than trying to binge all dozen or so right away.
Especially since volume 2 is out of print and a new printing is expected in
June (I may just read it from the library before that, though). Recommended.
Available though Comics Pass in Library Plus, check your local library. The
physical volume is $15, and a new printing of it seems to have just shipped
(my local B&N did get it in briefly but it sold out very quickly).
Trades:
Trade paperbacks, collections, graphic novels, pocket manga, whatever.
If it's bigger than a "floppy" it goes here.
Easygoing Territory Defense by the Optimistic Lord: Production Magic
Turns a Nameless Village into the STRONGEST FORTIFIED CITY vol 2: Seven Seas
Entertainment - This volume is all about getting the village ready for the
next attack, which obligingly happens at the end of the volume and is not
what they were expecting. Lord Van doesn't really prove the value of
Production Magic here, what he mostly proves is that a bottomless font of
mana can make any magic effective. There's hints at some things he could
teach other Production Mages, thanks to his memories of the atomic model of
matter and some stuff he probably read about nanomaterials, but for the
moment he's the only Production Mage in town. Oh, and for those who know
Seven Seas' reputation for racier stuff (of which there's a lot in Villainess
below), there is a bathing scene, but Lord Van manages to have enough
self-control to insist he's too grown up to bathe with his hot maid and the
hot mage lady, although there's some reader service in which he imagines it).
So, cake and eat it too, I guess. Anyway, plot device level powers aside,
he's mostly using his charisma and the unexpected value of "noble treating
commoners well" when it comes to bringing people together. Time will tell if
his magic is ever more than just greasing the wheels, or if the story
actually looks at raising the general repute of the gift. Recommended.
$13.99/$17.99Cn Rated Teen 13+ for a bit of risque stuff.
Chainsaw Man vol 15: Viz Media/Shonen Jump - Pretty much a volume-long
running fight with the Falling Devil, who despite her name and associated
fear is really more of a chef. Her goal is to feed one or both of the
protagonists to another devil, but is willing to break a lot of eggs to make
this omelet. Denji continues to be stupid, while Asa/War's internal
conflicts continue to be more dangerous to them than any external threat.
This is all pretty much sideshow to the main plot, which finally gets some
motivation explanation (e.g. why is Famine doing whatever the heck she's been
doing, what's her angle?). Mainly ultraviolent fan service, though. Mildly
recommended. $11.99/$15.99Cn/#8.99UK, rated Older Teen for all the death and
gore.
I'm In Love With The Villainess vol 6: Seven Seas Entertainment - Time
for a summer vacation down at the seaside community Rae's character is from.
There's an issue I've run into in computer games where they don't really have
a proper model for middle-aged people, they just look like teenagers with
maybe graying hair. Rae's mom seems to be a deliberate use of that issue, in
that she looks like a teenager (but to Rae's dismay, is much more endowed).
Her mom is also weirdly creepy and inappropriate in a friendly way, to the
point that Rae's own unsettling behavior probably seems like it runs in the
family. In terms of plot-relevant stuff, Rae starts to see the storyline
changing in more and more drastic ways, even getting caught by surprise a few
times. The game had always been a small slice of a larger world, and as she
tries to drag it off its rails she's finding that someone or something is
trying to lay new tracks to get to the same destination. To get the romance
ending she wants, she seems to be changing it from a romance sim to a
geopolitical sim. I do hope the shift is made fully, because as I noted in a
previous review, a lot of the stuff Rae does to/with Claire would be outright
unacceptable from a male protagonist with a female object of affection these
days, and it's not exactly sustainable here either. Mildly recommended.
$12.99/$16.99Cn Rated Teen 13+ for some Benny Hill level cheesecake antics.
Go Go Loser Ranger vol 10: Kodansha - I think the script wrote some
checks that the art couldn't cash this time. The story jumps around in time
with lacunae and flashbacks and it's not really clear when any of it happens.
In a Western-style comic, they'd use panel borders or changes in coloration
or something to help set this apart, but this is B&W and nothing really
changes about the panels. Some narrative captions might've helped, or maybe
not. The coherence doesn't even always hold up within a scene, making me
wonder if there was also a translation problem? Anyway, as unclear as many
things are this volume, it IS clear that Fighter D's quest was a fool's
errand to begin with. Everything was more messed up than he thought, there's
loads of history he totally missed out on being trapped in the sky fortress
with no real knowledge of events on the ground below. In short, he's been
almost incidental to the actual plot, a background character who got uppity
and did manage to make some minor alterations to the plotting of the real
protagonists and antagonists but only now sees how little change he really
had. After wrestling with his place in things for most of the volume (mostly
in the background, unnoticed, although he does get a few scenes where people
actually care about his opinions), he finally comes to a philosophical
position that will let him move forwards. It's a STUPID position, but that's
just what kinda guy Fighter D is. Mildly recommended, mostly knocked down
for the coherence issues. $10.99/$14.99Cn Rated Teen 13+ for some B&W
ultraviolence.
Happy Kanako's Killer Life vol 7: Seven Seas Entertainment - SO much
Ugly Crying this volume. Also, like Go Go Loser Ranger, some poor visual
storytelling at some early key moments. The "spurned ex" plot comes to a
lethal resolution, I think? The whole scene was muddled, if there hadn't
been a "disposing of the body" scene later I wouldn't have known that after
several "shot but not dead" panels someone had finally been killed. The
middle of the volume is about Kanako trying to get her groove back, she's
finding job satisfaction and her ability to DO the job to be incompatible.
Mildly recommended. $14.99/$18.99Cn Rated Teen 13+ for decidedly non-graphic
murdering.
Mr. Villain's Day Off vol 4: Square Enix Manga - A bunch of vignettes as
usual, but the bulk of them involve a new character in the form of a robotic
cat who is secretly an agent of next season's villains. To the extent this
series looks to have an overarching plot (it really doesn't), the tone is
leading towards a "heroes and villains come to terms and then team up to
fight the next menace" sort of thing. This is lampshaded by the opening
piece, in which The General has an internal debate about what aspects of the
human world must be preserved following the conquest, and it's starting to
look like "all of them" will be the answer. He's not just into pandas now,
or even just cute animals. Recommended. $14.99/$19.99 Rated Teen (probably
out of inertia, there really isn't anything worse than a panel or two of the
General in monster form).
Batman: Wayne Family Adventures vol 4: DC/Webtoon - This covers episodes
72-94, which leaves 95-116 to wrap up season 2 in volume 5 (season 2 ended
back in December 2023 online). As usual it's a mix of funny stories and
touching character-driven stories with a small handful of more traditional
superhero stuff along the way (generally the weakest links). A few more
non-Gotham characters get into the mix, such as Aquaman and Green Lantern,
and as far as I can tell they continue to borrow elements from the regular
comics without worrying too much about continuity otherwise. (Yes, the
Thrasher mech suit comes from the comics, silly as its use in this volume
is.) Starbite's line art continues to be the perfect complement to both the
serious and the silly stories. Strongly recommended. $14.99/$19.99Cn
Expected next month: More Delicious in Dungeon (haven't decided how much
more, but at least vol 2-4), Great Cleric vol 9, The Deep Dark (by Molly
Ostertag), Kaiju no. 8 vol 10, Barda (DC), Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. vol
2, maybe Cat + Gamer vol 5 depending on when it ships.
Floppies:
No, I don't have any particular disdain for the monthlies, but they
*are* floppy, yes? (And not all of them come out monthly, or on a regular
schedule in general, so I can't just call this section "Monthlies" or even
"Periodicals" as that implies a regular period.)
Fantastic Four #18-19: Marvel - Two done-in-one issues with cosmic stuff
going on. #18 focuses on Franklin Richards and reminds readers that he's
technically massively godlike and will survive past the end of the universe.
North does seem to really like using Salem's Seven as more of a "sneak around
and cause problems because they know they can't win a straight fight" threat.
#19 is a noir detective story featuring Alicia Masters as the detective and
Reed Richards as the missing person she needs to track down. Both were
decent reads, although neither grabbed me as much as they seem to be grabbing
others I see online. Mildly recommended. $3.99 each.
Vengeance of the Moon Knight #3-4: Marvel - The therapy framing
sequences continue (Soldier in #3 and Hunter's Moon in #4), with the new Moon
Knight proving himself to be a danger to the area as his reckless and
ruthless actions upset some delicate balances. MacKay does a good job of
ramping up the tension and dropping clues here and there to the true identity
of the new Moon Knight. Nor does he cheat even a little, he's got a track
record of digging up obscure characters from Moon Knight's history and
related stories...the guy under the mask even has a record of doing this sort
of thing (well, not of being Moon Knight as far as I can recall, but the
whole scourge of the underworld bit...not Scourge of the Underworld, though).
Recommended. $4.99 each.
Gargoyles #12 (of 12): Dynamite - A lot of talking heads as the last
dregs of the gang war plot wraps up. And frankly, I'm not regretting my
decision to stop getting Gargoyles comics again. Yawn. This isn't even a
case of not measuring up to childhood nostalgia, I was an adult when the show
aired (and already posting comics reviews online). But just like the
previous Gargoyles comics, it just didn't manage to capture any of the stuff
I liked about the show. Years of trying hasn't really improved Weisman's
comics-writing chops. Neutral. $3.99
Vampirella/Dracula Rage #5 (of 6): Dynamite - More of the same as the
last couple issues. Psycho vengeance Vampi, murky art, Dracula being almost
a parody of a Priest villain in terms of chatting calmly and infodumping
while everyone assumes (correctly) that he's up to something shady despite
his denials. His big plan is revealed, and unless it's an elaborate form of
suicide it strikes me as kinda stupid. Maybe if it hadn't suffered so many
delays and managed to finish before #666 it'd have worked a little better,
but the long waits and muddy art really killed any momentum the Dracula
mega-arc had going for it. Neutral. $3.99
Vampirella #667 and #668: Dynamite - We continue through the Groundhog
Day experience, with Vampi slowly figuring out more and more about what's
going on, and the repeated world changing in unpredictable ways each time
through. Having two issues at once to read definitely helped this time, this
arc does feel like it'll work better as a trade. Mildly recommended as
individual issues, can't really judge the whole thing yet. $4.99
As you may notice, Marvel had some publishing hiccups that put some
books out more or less than a month apart. As series end or get cancelled
I'm less likely these days to add more, since what had been my local shop
does not allow people to even open the cover to look inside before buying
(Comics Are A Collectible), so I really have no incentive to try out anything
that doesn't grab me from just the Previews solicitation. No browsing = no
impulse buying. I didn't even bother hitting the store for FCBD.
Dave Van Domelen, "What did you people DO to that water?!" - Aquaman,
Batman: Wayne Family Adventures vol 4
Dave's Comics and Manga Capsules for May 2024