Tag Archives: anything but capes

Anything but Capes: More Crime

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Bronx Kill
Writer: Peter Milligan
Artist: James Romberger

I learned two things from reading Bronx Kill.

1) In my previous post on crime comics, my definition of the genre was too narrow. Most crime comics tend to be about hard-boiled detectives, vigilantes, or dangerous heists. In other words, they’re typical male adventure stories. But there is another type of crime story: the missing loved one.  Like hard-boiled detective stories, the plot is based around a mystery – what happened to my missing wife/lover/child/etc. – but the mystery is much more personal for the protagonist, and the emotional impact of the crime is far greater. Missing loved one stories can sometimes function as vengeance fantasies, which could be seen as empowering. But more often than not they’re much bleaker stories where death and loss are inescapable, pain is all-consuming, and discovering the truth is actually far worse than not knowing. The most famous example of this sub-genre is The Vanishing, in which a man obsessively searches for his missing wife for three years, only to discover her terrible fate by sharing it.

Bronx Kill faithfully sticks to the missing loved one formula. The plot follows a novelist named Martin Keane, who wakes up one morning to discover that his wife is gone. Her disappearance has a strange connection to the murder of Martin’s grandfather and a rundown section of the Bronx riverfront named, obviously, the Bronx Kill. As the weeks go by, Martin’s sanity begins to slip, and he becomes increasingly irrational and violent until he finally stumbles upon the awful truth. And as these stories tend to go, the truth is far worse than the mystery.

Judged solely on its merits as a missing person mystery, the Bronx Kill is a decent comic. Milligan never strays far from genre conventions, but he knows how to pace a story and arrange the pieces of a plot so that the outcome isn’t obvious from page 1. Romberger’s art is functional and unassuming; it doesn’t add much to the comic but at least it doesn’t distract from the story either.

The one tedious aspect of the mystery is Milligan’s attempt to connect the main plot to a crime novel that Martin Keane is writing. The comic will occasionally be interrupted by a few pages of text about a murder in 19th century Ireland. Unfortunately, the novel is boring, and Milligan’s prose is often a chore to read. Rather than function as a thematic reflection of the main plot, the prose sections simply screw up the pacing.

2)  The other thing I learned from reading Bronx Kill is that writers are not manly. I’ll repeat for emphasis: WRITERS ARE NOT MANLY. Apparently, this is the great tragedy of being a writer. You can create entire worlds and populate them with fascinating characters who enrich people’s lives, but at the end of day you’re still an impotent wimp. Worse, you’re a wimp who has to be saved by your girlfriend after being threatened by a bum.

And then there are the daddy issues. God help the writer who has a father with a manly profession, like law enforcement. 50% of Bronx Kill is just Martin dealing with the fact that he can never live up to the expectations of his old man, a respected New York police detective. And while I’m trying to avoid being spoilerish, I can’t resist noting that Martin is cuckolded in an exceptionally emasculating manner.

To be fair, Milligan seems to know just how ridiculous it is for writers to constantly fret over their masculinity. Martin Keane may not be as tough as his father, but he eventually realizes that his dad is full of shit. And Martin is at least competent enough to solve the mystery of his missing wife (albeit only after a big clue falls conveniently into his lap).

But acknowledging the shortcomings of the masculine ideal isn’t the same thing as coming up with an alternative. And Milligan is still working within the confines of a male genre, so the climax of Bronx Kill is the same as the climax of most crime stories: fists, guns, and screaming. Nor are the wife’s motives of any real importance. This is yet another story that’s all about men dealing with their crappy fathers.

Bronx Kill is an uneven, occasionally engaging entry into an often overlooked sub-genre of crime, though a reader’s enjoyment of the comic is dependent on their tolerance for writers with daddy issues.

Anything but Capes: Crime Time

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So many crime comics, so little time. Vertigo alone must publishes half a dozen pulp crime monthlies, and that doesn’t even include the Vertigo Crime imprint. I already reviewed one of the Vertigo Crime graphic novels here, so I’ll limit this post to monthly titles.

Reviews

Choker #1
Writer: Ben McCool (that can’t possibly be his real name)
Artist: Ben Templesmith
Publisher: Image Comics

Crime and horror are an unlikely pairing. They may share an appreciation for violence and brooding scenery, but the primary appeal of the genres are at odds. Crime stories are generally empowerment fantasies, whether the focus is on the criminal (empowerment against authority) or the detective (empowerment in service to authority). Horror is more about powerlessness, and the thrills and scares that come from being vicariously helpless. These are two genres that just don’t mix well. (Now, some of you will argue, “What about Seven? That had detectives and it was scary up until the moment the killer was revealed to be Kevin Spacey.” But Seven wasn’t really a crime story, because the detective scenes with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman were not critical to the film’s appeal. They just filled in time between the big gross-out moments). All of this is a roundabout way of explaining why Choker is not a good comic.

Set in the future, the plot follows a lowly private detective named Johnny Jackson. Formerly a cop, he’s given an opportunity to get his old job back if he can capture a drug dealer. About as basic a crime plot as they come, but the story quickly veers towards horror because the drug in question transforms its users into something akin to vampires.

The horror factor is also emphasized by the artwork. Ben Templesmith is best known for his work on several popular horror comics, particularly 30 Days of Night. His art in Choker looks very similar: distorted bodies, the heavy use of black, grimy backgrounds. Though in Choker, he also uses lurid red and orange coloring to highlight the corruption and decadence of the future.

It looks very cool, but the flashy art can’t hide the fact that the comic doesn’t function well as either horror or crime. The horror aspect is undermined by the concepts inherent in a crime story. For example, by focusing the plot on the hard-boiled detective, McCool deflates any anxiety that the reader might have, because we all know that the chain-smoking tough guy isn’t going to die. At the same time, the crime story is diminished by the comic’s awkward attempts at being scary. The vampires in the story are meant to be creepy, but they’re really just super-powered junkies. It’s impossible to take the central conflict seriously. The book has a lot of ideas, but they remain incoherent and poorly executed.

Criminal – The Sinners #1
Writer: Ed Brubaker
Artist: Sean Phillips
Colorist: Val Staples
Publisher: Icon (Marvel)

Criminal is one of the least innovative comics being produced by any mainstream publisher. Ed Brubaker writes stereotypical crime stories: square-jawed protagonists, femme fatales, and endless monologues. Sean Phillips and Val Staples illustrate the comic in the most predictable manner possible: dark colors, thick black lines, a general impression of an overbearing world. We’ve seen this all before.

The plot of this issue is also familiar. Tracy Lawless (a character from an earlier story arc) is stuck working as a hitman for a mob kingpin. He’s offered a chance to walk away, but only if he can figure out who’s murdering the mobster’s lieutenants. It’s a typical anti-hero plot, with the obligatory sub-plot involving the mobster’s sexy wife.

Brubaker and company aren’t doing anything new or original – and that’s okay. So what if they don’t re-invent the wheel? Wheels already do exactly what they’re supposed to do. I suppose I should laud innovation, but to be perfectly honest I’m only interested in innovation when it produces a great story. If creators tell a great story by inventing an entirely new genre of entertainment, then I’m happy. If creators tell a great story by relying on familiar tropes from a well-worn genre, then I’m happy.

Brubaker may not be an innovator, but he’s a reliable craftsman. The characters are all archetypes, but they’re enjoyable archetypes that fit perfectly into the world that Brubaker and Phillips have created. The plot is predictable, but it plods along with the implicit assurance that the payoff will be worth the wait. And while Phillips isn’t a daring artist, his pencils and inks effectively conveys both story and tone.

Criminal is nothing more and nothing less than the work of professionals who are doing exactly what they want to do.

Scalped #36
Writer: Jason Aaron
Artist: Davide Furno
Colorist: Giulia Brusco
Publisher: Vertigo (DC)

I’m not a regular reader of Scalped, but from what I’ve seen of the series I’m pretty sure it’s about Native American gangsters who run a casino. I think I read a review that described it as Sorpranos on an Indian reservation (hopefully without the pretentious dream sequences), or maybe it was Goodfellas on a reservation. But since it involves a casino, perhaps it should be Casino on a reservation. Scalped readers need to help me out here. What is the proper analogy? And is there an Indian Joe Pesci?

The first thing that came to mind as I read this issue: Scalped is a remarkably exploitative comic. A team of white creators produced a story about violent, lusty ethnic minorities who kill and fuck each other for the amusement of the predominantly white audience. And they even throw throw in a nod to Indian spirituality (one character actually narrates from beyond the grave). I suppose I should find all this offensive, but I’m actually impressed that Vertigo published a comic about Indians that didn’t involve Jonah Hex shooting them.

And once you get past the Indian-sploitation, it isn’t half bad. It has all the elements readers would expect from a gangster comic: sleazy casino owners, brutal violence, macho men. And there are a few things readers wouldn’t expect, such as the fact that the macho men enjoy gay sex.

The art is okay, in the way that art in Vertigo comics is always “kind of,” “sort of” okay. Davide Furno deserves some small praise for his character design, because at least Native Americans don’t look like white people with tans. But the art isn’t memorable in any way, which is the harshest thing I can say about it.

So this is a comic about gay, Native American gangsters, and (lackluster art aside) it truly is the best damn comic about gay, Native American gangsters that I’ve ever read.

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State of the Genre: For a genre that was once almost completely absorbed by superheroes, crime has made a massive comeback. In itself, the success of the crime genre is hardly surprising. Stories of crooks and heists and square-jawed detectives have remained popular in every other media for decades.  What is surprising is just how long it took for crime to recover as a prominent genre of American comics. Blame Wertham, the Comics Code, superhero fanboys, etc., etc.

But over the last couple decades the comics market has evolved to the point where it can sustain a significant number of crime comics. And given the size of the genre, it deserves an extra post, which is why I’ll be reviewing Peter Milligan’s Bronx Kill next week.

Anything But Capes: Blog of Terror

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This week, I’m reviewing five recent horror comics. Unlike barbarian comics, which I discussed back in January, horror comics are not scarce. It seems every publisher has at least a couple horror titles, and in the case of some of the smaller publishers (IDW, Devil’s Due), the majority of their comics are horror. However, as many as a third of these titles are licensed properties (that is, they’re based on movies or video games). I chose to review only original creations, not because they’re inherently good, but because I’m more interested in stories that are specific to comics. These five titles aren’t necessarily the best or the worst, but they are indicative of what American publishers are releasing in 2010.

Reviews:

Hellblazer #264
Publisher: Vertigo
Writer: Peter Milligan
Layouts: Giuseppe Camuncoli
Finishes: Stefano Landini
Colors: Trish Mulvihill

What’s the division of labor between the artist who does layouts and the artist who “finishes?” I assume the layout artist determines the shape and number of panels on each page, and perhaps also the contents of each panel. The finishing artist then adds the necessary details (or is my assumption completely wrong?). This could lead to some awkward, ugly comics if the two artists have different styles. But this is a Vertigo comic, and most of the artists who work for Vertigo tend to use the same semi-realistic, functional style that effectively conveys the story without drawing attention to itself. Camuncoli and Landini work well together, and they produce a comic that’s clear, consistent, and bland.

As for the story, this issue is the final chapter in a storyline within a book that’s been published continuously for two decades, so it isn’t exactly a great jumping-on point (and no recap page, because DC/Vertigo thinks recap pages are for wimps). Still, Peter Milligan is an experienced mainstream comics writer, and he knows that every issue is someone’s first, so he provides narration at the front of the book that helps new readers catch up. The plot, in a nutshell, is about John Constantine fighting a Victorian-era demon in Mumbai. Like the art, the writing is polished and professional, though not particularly memorable.

While it’s also tempting to complain that the story is predictable, predictability is really the whole point. Hellblazer, like most long-running titles, is comfort food for fans, and Milligan knows where and when to deliver the expected beats of a John Constantine story. There are demons, spells, smoking, and British profanity. But the old, reliable formula that makes it good comfort food also makes it terrible horror. Horror works best when it exploits the fear of the unknown and the unexpected. This is why horror film franchises quickly descend into self-parody – once the monster is revealed in the first film, the audience no longer fears it, so the sequels are just the repetition of events that are humorous and comforting precisely because they’ve lost the ability to scare. Milligan’s take on Hellblazer avoids becoming a self-parody by simply abandoning any pretense at being scary. It’s a magic-themed action/adventure that’s indistinguishable from the superhero titles published by DC, except that the characters get to say “fuck” instead of “#&$%.”

The Walking Dead #70
Publisher: Image
Writer: Robert Kirkman
Artist: Charlie Adlard
Gray Tones: Cliff Rathburn

According to the Direct Market sales charts posted at The Beat, The Walking Dead is one of Image’s best-selling monthly comics. Which is bizarre, because if there was ever a comic that should only be read in collected volumes rather than monthly issues, it’s The Walking Dead. Kirkman’s pacing ranges from leisurely to glacial, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing in a longer book. The horror of The Walking Dead has less to do with the zombies than with how their ever-present threat transforms the survivors. Over the course of a trade, readers can appreciate how all the characters (or at least the ones that don’t get offed) slowly change, usually for the worst, in response to the collapse of civilization. But it’s hard to get any sense of that in a typical monthly issue, which has only a small portion of the plot and character development. Issue #70 is a perfect example: the survivors are welcomed into a walled, zombie-free community and meet the community leaders (who will probably turn out to be evil). That’s it. In another six to twelve months this might become an interesting story, but I can’t imagine paying $3 a month for snippets of content.

The art in the issue is easier to discuss. Adlard’s style is thoroughly mainstream, meaning a realistic aesthetic and a simple panel layout that moves the narrative forward. The one unusual aspect of the art (by the standards of mainstream American comics) is that it’s in black-and-white.

This was a clever creative decision, as the black-and-white gives The Walking Dead an earthy, retro vibe reminiscent of the classic zombie film, Night of the Living Dead. But setting aside the pop culture homage, Adlard rarely does anything interesting with the black-and-white format. On occasion, he’ll use dark inks and sharp contrast to evoke a film noir tone, but most of the panels wouldn’t be harmed by the addition of color. In other words, the art does what the story requires of it, nothing more and nothing less.

The Unknown – The Devil Made Flesh #4
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Writer: Mark Waid
Artist: Minck Oosterveer
Colors: Andres Lozano and Javier Suppa

The first thing I noticed about The Unknown is that it has a recap page that efficiently summarized the previous three issues. As a new reader, I liked this feature. I will never understand why DC and a few other publishers refuse to include recap pages. If you insist on publishing monthly issues, then why not throw new readers a bone? Not everyone can jump in on the first issue.

The story centers on Catherine Allingham, a detective who’s slowly dying from a brain tumor. On top of that problem, she’s been dragged into a mystery involving a small town serial killer and a ghost that keeps possessing the townspeople. It ends with a big battle in a cave and some revelations about future storylines, which may involve the Devil (made flesh). Like most contemporary comics, The Unknown has a “decompressed” pace, meaning that the plot and characters are gradually developed over multiple issues. But unlike Robert Kirkman, Waid knows how to squeeze as much content as possible into 22 pages. Reading a single issue of The Unknown feels like reading four issues of The Walking Dead.

But more content doesn’t equal better content. Waid’s writing has always beens mechanical and generic, like he’s working from a genre checklist. Characters do exactly what readers expect of them, and plots resolve themselves in the simplest manner possible. The Unknown is no exception: the central conflict ends with a violent climax, the villains get their appropriate comeuppance, and a sufficient amount of information is revealed to move the larger story forward.

The art doesn’t help matters. Oosterveer attempts a straightforward, mainstream style, but his art comes across as amateurish. Spatial relationships are confusing, backgrounds will be drawn in detail in one panel but disappear in the next, and the characters’ faces frequently go off-model. To put it simply, the entire comic just looks half-assed and rushed.

Devil #1 (of 4)
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Writer/Artist: Torajiro Kishi and Madhouse Studios

Someone at Dark Horse decided that they needed a new horror comic, something fresh and original. And where are all the fresh and original ideas coming from? Japan! So Dark Horse formed a partnership with manga-ka Torajiro Kishi (best known for the yuri title Maka Maka) and anime producer Madhouse Studios (Ninja Scroll, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust). The fresh and original idea they came up with was a story about cops who hunt vampires … which admittedly sounds like every third comic published in the 1990s.

But there are two twists. The first is that the vampires are called devils, because in a post-Twilight world, “vampire” is no longer hardcore. The second twist illustrates why Japanese creators are always the smarter choice. I’ll let the main characters explain:

“When a victim is raped by a devil, the victim dies from the poison contained in its sperm.” And by die, they mean burst like a water balloon.

This is why Dark Horse needed Kishi and Madhouse Studios. Any American hack can write a story about cops who hunt vampires. They might even throw in some misogyny. But when it comes to uncensored depravity, American creators are actually quite timid. You need a Japanese creator to get a story about poison sperm that causes women to explode. It’s not any good, of course, but extraordinary sleaziness has a way of concealing every other flaw.

We Will Bury You #1 (of 4)
Publisher: IDW Publishing
Writer: Brea Grant with Zane Grant
Artist: Kyle Strahm
Colors: Zac Atkinson

Brea Grant plays the character Daphne on Heroes. That’s a red flag: when an actor starts slumming in the funny book industry that usually means they’re pitching a movie script disguised as a comic.

Though perhaps I’m being unfair to Grant, because I can’t imagine a major studio ever producing a film adaptation of this comic. The pitch: in 1927, a cross-dressing Ukrainian immigrant and her taxi dancer girlfriend are planning to flee New York after murdering the girlfriend’s husband, but they get caught up in a (Communist-themed) zombie apocalypse. Now that’s what I call high concept.

As this is only the first issue, it’s hard to say whether it will turn out to be a original zombie story. The zombie sub-genre has been thoroughly explored in every medium, and Grant is hardly the first writer to link zombie scares to the Red Scare. On the other hand, there’s never been a zombie story featuring flappers, and who doesn’t like flappers?

Plus, the comic has some engaging artwork.

Kyle Strahm’s style, with its distorted physiques and bleak backgrounds, is well-suited to horror. And the use of numerous thick lines gives his art a coarse, disheveled look. It effectively captures the grime and poverty of New York City tenements in the early 20th century. Zac Atkinson uses color to great effect too, as key characters are given more vibrant outfits so that they stand out from the darker backgrounds. More than a few panels, however, are rough around the edges in ways that Strahm probably didn’t intend. There’s a thin line between bleak and boring, and Strahm’s backgrounds occasionally step over it, and the facial features of the heroines seem to change on every other page.

Despite some misgivings, I liked the first issue of Brea Grant’s comic. It’s certainly better than her TV show.

State of the Genre

Overall, the horror genre is doing quite well. It has its share of shitty comics, but there are a few decent titles in the mix. And despite the dominance of superheroes in the Direct Market, horror comics have carved out a stable niche. There’s a broad selection of titles available in a variety of sub-genres (though zombies are far and away the most popular). It’s also worth mentioning that there are several genre hybrids that I passed over for reviewing, including Hellboy (horror/superheroes), Locke and Key (horror/fantasy) and the recently released Choker (horror/crime). On a less positive note, there’s an awful lot of licensed properties, but that’s hardly surprising given that an established brand with a built-in fanbase is always the safer bet. Fortunately, the horror genre hasn’t yet become an endless parade of Freddy v. Jason v. Chucky one-shots.

Anything But Capes

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Alternate Title: Barbarians at the Blog!

Back in 2000, the world was a better, simpler place.* The American comics market exemplified this simplicity. It consisted of Marvel superheroes, DC superheroes, Image superheroes, a few dark fantasies from Vertigo, and those Star Wars comics that Dark Horse keeps churning out. Not exactly a broad selection, but perfect for aging nerds who grew up reading superhero comics and watching Star Wars.

But something happened over the past decade. Publishers started producing more comics that had nothing to do with superheroes. Suddenly, there were a lot more horror comics, crime comics, science fiction comics, war comics, and even Westerns (you know something big is going down when Westerns make a comeback). If the comics industry didn’t grow much in size, it at least grew in variety.

Over the next couple months, I plan to see what the American comics market has to offer that doesn’t involve capes and tights. Because I’m interested in what the comics industry is producing at the beginning of the new decade, I’ll only be looking at recent titles, not reprinted material. To keep myself focused, I’m going to organize the books into genres and review a sample of titles. I have no intention of reading and reviewing every title of every genre, so instead I’ll rely upon a complex scientific formula to select titles that are most representative of each genre. The explanation of my method is provided in footnote **. After the reviews, I’ll summarize the state of each genre, looking at both its size in the market and the overall quality of its titles.

I’ll begin with a genre that has had its share of ups-and-downs in the comics market … barbarians! For the sake of clarity, barbarian comics are fantasy stories about muscular men in loin clothes killing shit with swords and axes. Of course, there’s room for variation on this basic model. For example, woman in chainmail bikini can be substituted in for man in loin cloth. But barbarian stories are not simply high fantasy tales; there needs to be a significant amount of violence, sex, and characters who never wear pants (as a counterexample, The Lord of the Rings has some violence but no sex and way too many pants). Also, comics about fantasy strongmen who arrive in the present day and fight crime are not barbarian stories. They’re superhero stories that steal the surface appeal of barbarian stories.

I looked hard for recently published barbarian comics, but I found only about half a dozen titles, four of which I chose to review below. None of these titles were selling well in the Direct Market, but all of the titles had prior storylines collected and sold as trades, so presumably the DM isn’t the only source of sales. Now, onto the reviews…

Conan the Cimmerian #16
Writer: Timothy Truman
Artists: Timothy Truman and Tomas Giorello
Colorist: Jose Villarrubia
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics

Fact: The Cimmerians were a real people who inhabited the region around the Black Sea in the 8th and 7th centuries B.C.

Fact: They didn’t look like Austrian bodybuilders.

Of course, the Conan story has nothing to do with history and everything to do with Robert E. Howard‘s testosterone-fueled fantasies. But Conan isn’t just another masculine power fantasy. He pretty much is THE masculine power fantasy, the epitome of violence, sex, and rugged individualism. And no survey of barbarian comics would be complete without covering the latest iteration of the muscle bound brute who started it all.

I lucked out with Conan the Cimmerian #16, because it’s the beginning of a new storyline. There’s no recap page, but I had no problem figuring out what was going on. Conan somehow landed himself a sweet gig as the military adviser to a hot princess named Yasmela. Conan’s in love with her, but she only has eyes for an exiled prince named Julion, who’s girly compared to Conan. We know he’s a girly man because he does girly things, like giving flowers to girls and using multisyllabic words.

So Conan decides to impress her by doing something stupid, which results in his war band getting ambushed, and then Conan almost gets eaten by a velociraptor (it’s fantasy, not history).

As Conan stories go, this isn’t bad. It has character-driven conflict, Conan is a badass but not infallible, and there’s violence and (implied) sex.

The comic falters on the art. Tomas Giorello does the first seven pages and the final page, and his work is perfectly suited to a Conan book. His backgrounds are lush, and he uses numerous small lines to give more detail to his characters, which would be annoying in a different context, but in a barbarian book it gives the characters a distinctly savage look.  But the majority of the comic is drawn by writer Timothy Truman, and his style is far less detailed and far more cartoonish. It isn’t terrible art, but the transition from Giorello to Hutton and back again is jarring, especially in a comic that’s only 24 pages.

Overall, a decent barbarian comic, but not one that entices me to follow the series.

Hercules: The Knives of Kush #1
Writer: Steve Moore
Artist: Cris Bolson
Colorist: Doug Sirois
Publisher: Radical Comics

Reading Hercules, I couldn’t help but take pity on the Nemean Lion. The Nemean Lion was just doing what lions do when a violent Greek showed up and killed him, skinned him, and decided to hear the Lion’s head as a hat.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the Nemean Lion because this comic wasn’t very interesting.

The plot is serviceable: Hercules and his band of misfits arrive in Egypt during a civil war. They decide to work as mercenaries for the legitimate pharaoh, who’s losing the war to his half-brother. It seems that the would-be-usurper has formed an alliance with a sorcerer who leads the titular Knives of Kush.

Unfortunately, nothing else about the comic is the least bit engaging. Most of the characters, including Hercules, lack a distinguishable personality or voice, and in any case they spend spend the entire issue delivering page after page of exposition and occasionally engage in non-witty banter.

The art is also pretty bad. Cris Bolson puts a lot of detail into his panels, but his characters look stiff and plastic. As a result, the fight scenes resemble action figures posed in mid-attack, which robs the violence of any excitement. His sexy women aren’t very sexy either.

Hercules is a hard character to screw up. But he’s also been so extensively ripped off and parodied that creators need to bring something more to the table than just a standard sword and sorcery plot. That’s about all you get here.

Warlord #9
Writer/Artist: Mike Grell
Colorist: David Curiel
Publisher: DC Comics

Warlord follows the adventures of Travis Morgan, a man from the regular world who somehow got trapped in the barbarian world of Skartaris. But other than the occasional war, being trapped in Skartaris doesn’t seem like such a bad deal. Morgan has a hot princess girlfriend named Tara and a hot pseudo-girlfriend named Shakira who can turn into a cat. In fact, hot, scantily-clad women are as numerous as trees in Skartaris. And Morgan seems to have embraced the local dress-code because his outfit consists of boots, a helmet, and armored underwear.

Not much happens in this issue, but that may not be a failure in the writing so much as the fact that this is a “down-time” issue. In a superhero comic, down-time issues are normally where characters sit around and whine about their relationships, but in Warlord the characters just have sex. And there is a lot of sex in this issue. Nothing too racy, of course (this is still a DC comic), but Grell manages to include some nice cheesecake. Though the guitar as phallic symbol is a little too obvious.

As an artist, Grell has his share of strengths and weaknesses. His backgrounds are well-designed and his characters can be quite attractive. But his fight scenes lack any real sense of impact, his characters often seem disconnected from the panels they occupy, and panel layout can occasionally be rather confusing.

Problems with the art aside, of all the barbarian comics I read, this seemed the most polished and one with the most depth to its characters and universe. Not surprising, given that Mike Grell created Warlord, and he clearly knows what he’s doing with this book. Unfortunately, this comic has some dense continuity, not just with the previous 9 issues but also with prior Warlord comics. To be fair, there’s a quite a bit of exposition that’s intended to help new readers catch up, but knowing what happened previously isn’t the same as caring. Like so many comics that have been around (off-and-on) for years, Warlord proceeds with the assumption that its readers are already fans, and there’s only minimal effort to show new readers why they should care about any of this.

But I’m curious enough about Warlord that I’ll probably look for the first trade paperback and see whether my opinion changes.

Queen Sonja #1
Writer: Joshua Ortega
Artist: Mel Rubi
Colorist: Vinicius Andrade (*that is an awesome name*)
Publisher: Dynamite

Don’t let the title fool you. This is not a Female Force bio-comic about Queen Sonja of Norway. Rather, this is the sequel to Dynamite’s Red Sonja comic, but there’s no evident continuity with the previous title. As someone who never read a Red Sonja comic, I can appreciate the fresh start.

As the title makes clear, Sonja is now a queen (of Made-up Land), and the comic is mostly a flashback about how she ended up on the throne. Sonja agrees to avenge an old woman’s late husband and recover a family heirloom, and along the way she’s clearly going to come into conflict with an evil empire. There’s also plenty of violence and gore in this comic, in the best barbarian tradition. But the plot and the action (not to mention the one-dimensional characters) are completely overwhelmed by the massive amounts of cheesecake. Every other panel focuses on Sonja’s perfect body and the chainmail bikini that seems perpetually about to fall off.

Now, I don’t have a problem with cheesecake, I just wrote a paragraph praising the cheesecake in Warlord, but in this title the cheesecake was ridiculously excessive. But when I stopped to think about it, the cheesecake is ultimately what this comic is all about. Let’s be honest: the selling point of Red Sonja is not really the violence and it certainly isn’t the plot. It’s a comic about a hot red-head in a chainmail bikini. Either you want to look at a hot red-head in a chainmail bikini, or you don’t. Giving her a more tasteful outfit would only take away the one thing that makes Sonja memorable. And there’s no point in pretending that readers, especially women, are going to be won over by Sonja’s “personality,” or the slim bits of dialogue.

Admittedly, my interest in barbarian comics is that of a casual reader, not a fan, but a monthly comic seems  like an expensive way to indulge a fetish for barbarian pin-ups. Still, the current Red Sonja franchise has lasted for over 4 years, so there must be plenty of people out there who like this. And unlike superhero comics, barbarian comics aren’t (or shouldn’t be) marketed towards children, so the cheesecake here isn’t age-inappropriate.

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State of the Genre: meager. Very few titles to choose from, and most of them lack truly distinctive features  that set them apart from the rest. They all satisfy the basic expectations for a barbarian comic (fantasy setting, violence, cheesecake, lack of pants), but only Warlord suggests that it might have something more in content.

The next time I appraise a genre, I’ll try one that’s a bit more robust, maybe horror.

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*This is not true.