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 Well, none of this month's tornadoes got too close to me.
At the moment, it looks like printed matter is slipping through the
trade war random tariffs, but that is likely to last only until someone
brings it to the attention of the President. I've been seeing comics and
gaming store owners interviewed on national nightly news about the impending
doom.
Anyway, since this is a light month, I decided to try harder to check
out new titles, both via LibraryPass and looking around for ideas. One thing
I tried was looking for lists of well-regarded superhero manga. In addition
to usual suspects like My Hero Academia and One-Punch Man, there were a few
that looked good but the translations either got cut off mid-story (Ratman)
or that don't seem to be available in print at all (Heroic Complex). In
general, I'd rather not start a manga with too much backlog, if only because
it can be a real hassle trying to FIND all the older volumes (Spy x Family
was a real hunt, and I started at vol 7!), so the farther along it is the
less inclined I am to give it a shot. Still, I did try out Shy below,
despite my reluctance regarding its backlog.
Items of Note (strongly recommended or otherwise worthy): Nothing this
month.
In this installment: What If...Wanda Maximoff and Peter Parker were
Siblings?, Stardust the Super Wizard archive, I Picked Up This World's
Strategy Guide vol 1-2, Octo-Girl vol 1, Magilumiere Magical Girls vol 7,
Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear vol 12, Mecha-Ude: Mechanical Arms vol 1, Shy vol 1.
"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.
What If...Wanda Maximoff and Peter Parker were Siblings?: Marvel/Random
House Worlds - I got this a few months ago, but it finally made it to the top
of my virtual TBR stack. I haven't gotten the other books in the series, and
don't plan to, I picked this up in part because Seanan McGuire wrote it (and
did not write the others). There's an arc connecting the three novels,
involving America Chavez's role in things, but the actual story of Wanda and
Peter does wrap up in just this volume. Lots of third person
semi-omniscient, getting inside Wanda's head, but at the same time things
unfurl in a dramatic enough fashion (unlike the traditionally under-emotional
Watchers narrating a What If, America gets invested in the story). There's a
certain amount of "It's Marvel, so these things must happen in every
timeline," along with the standard "any alternate timeline will necessarily
be at least a little worse than the main timeline" element long established
for What Ifs, but the story is not a complete bummer, and McGuire really put
a lot of thought into all the ways things would change despite the things
that could not. Recommended. Price depends on format, currently $13.99 for
the Kindle edition, but I got it when it was on sale for $2.99.
I started two "based on the comics" shows this month, Doom Patrol S4 and
Iyanu Child of Wonder S1. While I plan to eventually finish Doom Patrol (got
about halfway through this month), after watching the first three episodes of
Iyanu I didn't really feel like watching more. I think part of it is that
Iyanu is a more faithful adaptation, while Doom Patrol is riffing on
storylines and character elements while also telling new stories. I think
that's kind of a thing for me lately, where I really like a comic or manga
but don't really get into the anime that tells fundamentally the same story.
I did get through the first half season of Spy X Family, but the second half
has been sitting on my To Be Watched pile unwatched. I got one episode into
Delicious in Dungeon. I have watched all of the motion-comic of Way of the
Househusband so far, but that's vignettes and easier to do in bite-sized
chunks. All in all, I prefer to consume media at my own pace, if you want me
to go at your pace you need to bring something I can't get in other formats
(different story, REALLY good animation or voice work/acting or music), or at
least not demand too much of my time. Conversely, once I've seen enough of
an anime or cartoon, I'm less interested in reading the manga/comic if it's
substantially the same story, part of why I don't just pick up the My Hero
Academia manga at some point post-volume-1.
Oh, and I saw Ninja Batman's sequel (Ninja Batman vs. the Yakuza League)
on the shelves, but left it there. The original was a "cool art, no story"
mess, there really wasn't anything there I wanted to see more of.
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. I will also occasionally
include things I read on Library Pass (check to see if your public library
gives access to it), although the interface can be laggy and freeze
sometimes.
Stardust the Super Wizard: Zoop, more or less - Last month I mentioned
the crowdfunded collection of entirely new Stardust stories, but what they
did deliver in time for me to read this month was a PDF of all the original
Fletcher Hanks stories (1939-1941). If you've been online long enough,
you've probably seen a few panels of this public domain series, and really
it's all as crazy as the snippets suggest. The fairly short and unevenly
drawn stories read like they were based on 5 year old kids playing superhero,
with one of the kids always having to win and making up whatever new powers
he needed in order to do so. Got a problem? Stardust has a ray for it. And
on the rare occasions where his opponents were ray-proof, he was also
superhumanly strong, fast, and durable. Despite Spectre-level powers, he
mostly fights gangsters, spies, gangster-spies, racketeers, and The Fifth
Column (without whom invasion is "impossible," and no matter how many of them
he kills there's always thousands more next issue), although once in a while
he fights menaces from other planets. Despite his impressive surveillance
equipment and impossible speed, he is also like the Spectre in that he mostly
punishes criminals for their deeds rather than stopping those deeds entirely.
So, everyone on Mars dies. Thousands die as a massive wave smashes ships on
its way to shore. That sort of thing. He is totally winging it. The whole
thing really does feel like Hanks was taking dictation from some kids and
just drawing what they said in the final minutes before a deadline. There is
a whimsy and energy to it, of course. But if you look at a McCloud-style
spectrum with Jack Kirby at one end and soulless technical perfection at the
other, these comics took a running leap off the Kirby end and are still going
outwards on super-excited light. I don't think there's really a
recommendation I can make here one way or the other, but it's public domain
and you should be able to find copies floating about if you wish to
experience it. Note, there's surprisingly little racism for a 1939-41 comic,
a few mentions of criminals framing "Japs" for an attack early on before
Hanks settles on just pointing at vague "invader nations" without naming any
of them. All the villains are grotesque, but Stardust can drift off-model in
some pretty horrifying ways too. The worst racist caricature I noticed was
in the gang leader Slant-Eyes, whose eyes were literally diagonally tilted,
but otherwise didn't seem to be an Asian caricature (everyone has about the
same speech patterns, with varying levels of gangster slang, but Hanks
doesn't really have much variation in dialogue). Mind you, there's probably
still some coded racism in there just because of The Way Things Were, but
there's no buck-toothed monkey guys mixing up R and L, or obvious German or
Italian slope-brow brutes that were so common in propaganda of the time. And
that counts for something (unfortunately) when talking about early Golden Age
comics.
I Picked Up This World's Strategy Guide vol 1: Yen Press - I was
browsing the recent releases on LibraryPass (Empowered vol 12 is on it, BTW)
and decided to give this a read. It's a full-color manga by Atchi Ai, and a
sort of "isekai themes but with a native" story. Sana is an NPC in a fantasy
JRPG world when she stumbles across a copy of the strategy guide to her
world, Eternal Story III (yeah, I suspect there's more than a little Final
Fantasy in the flavoring of this homage). So, rather than a character being
brought into the game world, it's a thing, but in the process it changes the
world in ways that a human visitor would. Because the story hasn't started
yet, the book has an oracular nature to Sana (who mistakes the copyright
notice as a badge of being a Forbidden Book), and she manages to save her
brother from a bit of tragic backstory happening to him, then tries to
prevent another bit of bad backstory...the hero's side quests are often about
correcting an injustice or dealing with the fallout of injustice, and Sana
wants to stop them from happening entirely. This, of course, leads to the
usual change-the-future issue of making things different but not necessarily
better along the way, but by the end of the volume she stumbles into the
start of the main story questline, oops. I guess she's a victim of the
narrative now. I did end up finding this in hardcopy form (along with volume
2, see below) before the end of the month...I found volume 2 first because it
was properly alphabetized under I-space-P, while volume 1 was two whole
shelves away under IP no space in between, oops. (Rather a lot of manga
start with the personal pronoun!) Recommended. $15.00/$19.50Cn, rated Teen
LV. Not a lot of either L or V in this volume, but it might get rougher
later.
Expected next month: The next Adventure Finders epilogue has been pushed
back, but should come out in May.
Manga Collections:
Most of these are "tankobon" or collections of work serialized in a
weekly or monthly publication, although some were written directly for the
collection. All of them have been translated from Japanese (or maybe Korean,
although I don't think I'm reading any manhwa) into English. Things with a
manga aesthetic but done in English originally will go in one of the sections
below as appropriate.
Octo-Girl vol 1: Marvel/Viz - This came out a few months ago, but while
browsing upcoming releases I saw volume 2, and my immediate reaction was,
"Who the Hell(TM) greenlit a manga combining a Japanese schoolgirl with
mechanical tentacles?" I mean, this is NOT an adult manga, not that I'd
expect Marvel to officially publish anything that did more than wink at the
whole tentacles-and-schoolgirls trope, but I read through a bit of this
volume in the store and decided to pick it up. And it's actually kinda
sweet. In terms of continuity, it's got a loose tie to the Deadpool Samurai
manga (which I have not read) and it relies on the whole Superior Spider-Man
arc without actually being tied down to whatever the heck is happening in the
main Spider-books at the moment. The premise is that, some time along after
Superior Spider-Man, Doc Ock has gotten used to pulling the "death train"
method of escaping capture. He just suicides and his mind is uploaded into a
fresh clone body at one of his many secret bases. He even has his own
bootleg copy of Mig O'Hara's Lyla (redone as Anna Maria 2.0) helping him run
the process. This time, however, there's an oops. Due to some older
brain-scanning tech of his being in use at the time of transfer in an attempt
to bring a Japanese schoolgirl (Otoha) out of a coma, his mind gets
downloaded into her brain instead. Cue the weird buddy comedy in which the
two have to share a body as Otto tries to find a way to get back into one of
his own bodies. How old is Otoha? No clue. She looks like a grade school
kid, but her former best friend from childhood looks to be 16 or so, and
other classmates are somewhere in between. This takes place in Tokyo, it's
not like she goes to a tiny one-room school with kids of all ages, so I guess
she's just 15-17 years old but destined to look more like Anna Maria 1.0.
(For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, during the Superior
Spider-Man era, Otto's brain was in Peter Parker's body, and he ended up
dating a coworker who is very short, I forget if it was a specific medical
condition or just Some People Be Short. That's Anna Maria.) There is just
enough backstory to figure out most of the clone-resurrection trick stuff
given in this volume, but Anna Maria 2.0 isn't really explained and doesn't
even come up after the opening scenes. Mainly, this is another try at a
redemption arc for Otto, as being forced to get along with others and not
just sneer at them (despite his best efforts, Otoha can sometimes interfere
with control over their shared body and stop Otto from just killing the fools
who get in his way) may require that this forking of Doc Ock finally develop
some emotional intelligence to go along with the scientific. Recommended.
$11.99/$15.99Cn/#8.99UK
Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc vol 7: Viz - This volume focuses on new
employees, because the previous main protagonist is now a seasoned veteran.
Okay, none of the new employees (or prospective hires) is actually as "true
newbie" as Kana, but they're behind the curve on learning how their sector is
changing, while Kana has basically been New Format from the word go...she has
no prior assumptions to unlearn. Pretty much the entire volume takes place
in Kyoto, while the boss is giving a presentation the others decide to check
out a potential engineer hire and we get to see how the history of magical
girls developed in this world, and confirmation that it goes back centuries.
So, naturally, it started with Mikos, or shrine maidens, and the inheritor of
the oldest magical girl lineage is the Miko of the shrine that marks the
first Kaii containment. Of course, a relaxing day at a celebration turns
into a Kaii crisis, and we get the first indication that the looming Big
Crisis is more than just a metaphor for the wealthy refusing to do anything
to stop environmental havoc...someone's accelerating things on purpose.
Recommended. $14.99/$19.99Cn/#10.99UK
Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear vol 12: Seven Seas Entertainment - Yuna gets sucked
into a side quest chain, basically. She just wants a mithril knife for her
assitant, so Fina can harvest from the increasingly tough monsters Yuna
slays. But the only source for mithril is currently shut down because of
Problems. So Yuna has to go see what's up there and see if she can speed up
the restoration of services, which of course leads to her getting sucked into
helping clear the mines...but she STILL doesn't want to draw too much
attention to herself or upset the existing adventurer hierarchy and piss
people off, so she has to sandbag just enough to not cause problems, but not
so much they fail. When you've got god-granted OP skills, threading a needle
of just the right amount of power can be a real challenge. Telling
compelling stories with really powerful characters can be difficult,
especially if you don't want to Dragonball it and just keep introducing
stronger foes. You can introduce deliberate weaknesses, like Kryptonite, but
then you risk getting gimmick stories. Kumanano takes a route that might not
work well for Superman, but works pretty well here...it really is "Man
vs. Self" to use the literary term, with Yuna always having to fight her own
shortcomings and flaws. A secondary struggle in this volume involves Yuna
not valuing herself and her assets highly enough and having to be lectured
about it by Fina, and neither is completely in the right on the matter.
Anyway, as tends to happen, succeeding in one quest dropped another, in the
form of a Quest Item that Yuna now needs to take to another community to get
evaluated because no one in the Capital can figure it out. Recommended.
$13.99/$17.99Cn rated Teen 13+
Mecha-Ude: Mechanical Arms vol 1: Scholastic - This one is in full
color, as is the norm for Scholastic products. The colorist is Jason Caffoe,
so the colors may have been added for the Scholastic edition, which is also
not terribly unusual for Scholastic products. The story in outline is a
really bog-standard "regular schlub high school student stumbles on a Plot
Device, befriends the Plot Device, gets sucked into a secret war between
powerful factions and needs to Git Gud or he'll Git Ded," sort of thing. In
this case, the plot devices are mechanical arms that latch onto human hosts
and can do various nifty things, with one faction enslaving the arms and the
other trying to liberate the arms. The only thing that makes this
interesting enough for me to give it another volume is the mostly-generic
tsundere minder the main character gets from the good guy faction. Aki does
visually fit the role, physically imposing, pretty in a scary way, doesn't
think highly of the main character. But she's also, like, feral or
something? Was she raised in an underground secret base with zero contact
with anyone not in the secret organization? (That seems likely.) Her utter
inability to be Normal is the source of about half the humor in the book (the
total naivete of the plot device mecha-arms covers most of the rest). On the
art side, it's good that it's in color, because the line work is hard to
follow at times...which is to say, in most of the action sequences. I wonder
if this is a mostly humor artist who is trying to break into action, because
the comedy beats work quite well visually. Mildly recommended.
$11.99/$15.99Cn/#10.99UK rated Middle Grade (ages 9-12)
I Picked Up This World's Strategy Guide vol 2: Yen Press - This one
wasn't on LibraryPass yet, but it had come out in hardcopy, so I got it too,
as noted above. The bulk of this volume takes place in the game's tutorial
zone, where the protagonist gets into his first fight, loses, and the player
discovers his uncontrollable super power before meeting a mentor who can
train him in the use of it. Sana really tries to avoid messing up the story,
but only succeeds in pushing it further and further off-track, oops. She
does seem destined to become the protagonist while the player character gets
to live a relatively quiet life or something. As a sign of her
protagonist-ness, she picks up her own antagonist (a seller of cheap and
shoddy potions), something that didn't happen in the strategy guide (possibly
because she averted the fate the guide had in store for her shop back in the
previous volume). When you really do live in a story, you can be doomed by
the narrative, and sometimes becoming the main character is the worst
possible fate. This continues to be an interesting spin on one of the isekai
standard tropes. Recommended. $15.00/$19.50Cn, rated Teen LV.
Shy vol 1: Yen Press - Okay, with volume 10 due in May, this was
something of a marginal try-out for me, but it was the only viable and
interesting-looking title I found while hunting for superhero manga. The
premise is that in the year 20XX world peace has been attained because of the
emergence of superheroes. Apparently each nation gets at most one, but there
were somehow enough to shift the balance of world power...the story is kinda
vague and wishcast-y on that matter. They all have Power Ranger style
transformations (which the author admits in a note were explicitly inspired
by Dairanger), and the title heroine is the newest protector of Japan, who is
otherwise a 14 year old high school girl. Other than a version of the Flying
Brick set, her powers are kind of undefined (and the Next Volume prompt
indicates she'll be developing new ones), but her name defines her story
hook: she's shy. Like, painful levels of social anxiety and rejection
avoidance. She first shows up on stage at a poorly attended event for some
other hero who we never see, who is either retired or is an actor in a
fictional role, all we know is that he inspired Shy in some way. But she
runs away before he comes on stage, so we don't meet him. The only other
hero we do meet initially is Russia's heroine, Spirit, who is "perpetually
sloshed" and thinks getting everyone drunk would probably lead to world
peace...kinda going for the low-hanging national stereotypes there.
England's hero, the second Stardust I've read about this month, is clearly
meant to be a David Bowie homage (as in Ziggy Stardust), rather than a Super
Wizard reference. Stardust comes on screen in the last chapter or so, and
it's implied that there's enough other heroes out there to require a
satellite base overwatch, but the author seems reluctant to define too much
yet. I do get a strong impression that there's a lot of "pantsing" going on
in the writing here, with the unrevealed things also being undecided things.
This can bite a writer in the pants, but by the end of the volume I'm just
interested enough to keep this on my list of "get the next volume if things
are slow and the next volume is in stock" titles. Mildly recommended.
$13.00/$17.00Cn, rated Teen LV.
(Toxic Super Beasts caught my interest reading the preorder, but I
decided I'd only pick it up if I had a chance to look at it on the shelf
first, and my B&N didn't stock it.)
Expected next month: Chainsaw Man vol 18, Octo-Girl vol 2, After God vol
4, Go Go Loser Ranger vol 13, I'm In Love With The Villainess vol 8. Happy
Kanako's Killer Life vol 8 is due to come out May 27, so I probably won't
have it until early June since the local B&N hasn't been stocking it on the
shelves and they don't ship online orders until release date (as opposed to
shipping a few days before so they arrive on release date). Looks like the
month might be light as well, so I might see if the next few volumes of Shy
are in stock.
Other Trades:
Trade paperbacks, collections, graphic novels, whatever. If it's bigger
than a "floppy" but not Manga, it goes here.
None this month.
Expected next month: Nothing, unless a crowdfund arrives. The next
non-manga collection/GN I'm expecting is due in June.
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.)
Yeah, this is a skip month for floppies. Light month in general, but I
decided I really didn't want to do another total skip. As I've mentioned
before, the inability to browse shelves has put a big damper on my
impulse-buying new new floppies, if not as big a damper as my Big Two Event
Fatigue. Manga I can flip through on the shelf, or as seen this month, I can
check it out on LibraryPass.
Expected next time: Fantastic Four #30, Moon Knight Fist of Khonshu #7,
My Little Pony Cadence One-Shot, Star Trek Lower Decks #5-6, Vampirella #1,
likely more. My general threshold for getting my folder sent is about ten
books. With Diamond's bankrupcy getting even worse, it might be kinda random
what week in a month any given book comes out for a while as my shop
reorganizes its ordering.
Dave Van Domelen, "It's kinda like...if you and Spider-Man had a kid
together?" "SILENCE! Such phrasing is unseemly!" - Otoha and Otto,
Octo-Girl vol 1
Dave's Capsules for April 2025