Meanwhile... Back at the Comic Book Blog

G-Man: Learning to Fly
By Chris Giarrusso

Chris Giarrusso is the creator of the Mini-Marvels comics that used to come out from Marvel. They were often the best part of the comics they were printed in and I remember just reading the Red/Blue/Green Hulk backups he drew in the current Red Hulk series.

Mavel, in all their brilliance, decided to stop publishing Mini-Marvel comics, in case they were confused with the not-nearly-as-good Super Hero Squad. Thanks Marvel.

Still, Giarrusso hasn't given up on creating awesome, funny superhero comics. Instead, he's returned to characters he created in the back pages of Savage Dragon.

G-Man (the G stands for G), and his friends, Billy Demon, Suntrooper, and others, fight crime! Well, sometimes. After school. Or at school. Maybe.

G-Man pokes fun at a lot of super hero tropes, but it's also obvious that Giarrusso really likes super hero comics, despite their occasional (or even frequent) stupidity. I'd say he even embraces the stupidity.

The heroes have to help a wizard find his golden chalice (it was in the sink). A Christmas tree comes alive, steals a car, and ends up working for Santa Claus ("Evergreen want to take responsibility for actions and make amends.").

As the comics were orignally backups we see Giarrusso using his limited space in a way you don't see that much in comics anymore. He packs panels into the pages. 16 per page is not uncommon, and 12 is more regular. There is lots of talking in this comic, but it's all good.

G-Man never fails to cheer me up, and I hope that the current mini series is successful enough for Giarrusso to continue making these comics.

Labels: comics, Image

This is another of the free comics that the Guardian gave out to its readers, and it's far more like the ones I used to read (the Beano, the Dandy, the Topper, and the Beezer) when I was a little kid.

One of the neat things about this one is that it actually is two different comics combined into one. Whizzer has the front page, but inside you'll find another front page, this time for Chips, and instructions on how to take out the staples and have two different comics. The front and back pages of Chips are in full colour, like the front and back of Whizzer, and unlike the rest of the comics which are either in black and white or have a single colour. Chips even has its own joke page!

Some of the comics inside are kind of weird. Most of them are just your average one or two page humour comics that I remember, but then you get the more adventurey ones that had apparently been phased out by the time I started reading comics. "Whizz" Wheels is about a "super-cyclist" who in this issue saves a villainous land agent from a forest fire while riding a penny farthing. Seriously.

There's also "Thingumajig!" which features a rather odd looking alien who, of course, says things like "Gg-uu-uuuh...my head spins and stomach tubes churn! This must be what Earthlings call sickness of the sea!" Oh aliens!

My favourite comic in it is also the only one I've ever seen before (or at least I think I've seen it before): Harry's Haunted House. It's about a ghost who doesn't like haunting people, and I thought it was fairly funny.

Or maybe I just really like the idea of a ghost sleeping in a bed.

Labels: comics, ipc

Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator
Written by Mark Schultz. Art by Ariel Olivetti.

Fuck me, this was terrible. Just incredibly, incredibly bad in almost every way a comic can be.

Well, I suppose that is not true, here are ten ways in which it could have be worse:

1. It could have been drawn by many different artists with completely conflicting styles. Olivetti is far too reliant on digital painting or whatever, but his scenes in the Daily Planet office are pretty good.

2. It could have not featured any aliens of any sort at all (instead of barely featuring them) and just been about Batman and Superman exploring some empty caves.

3. Lois could have been killed along with every other non-superhero in Peru, causing Superman to have to travel back in time to save her.

4. Batman's costume could, somehow, have been stupider.

5. The badguy humans could somehow have been more vaguely defined (this one would be tough, as they didn't even have names, just an organization, I guess you'd have to not even name the organization.)

6. The Aliens could have been even less dangerous, and not even been able to damage Superman's costume.

7. Lois could have been completely useless, instead of saving Batman by having a "basic working knowledge of Kyptonian mechanics."

8. There could have been more tiny, annoying robots.

9. It could have had Aquaman in it.

10. I don't know. It could have been twice as long, that would have been pretty awful.

Labels: comics, Dark Horse, DC

Judge Dredd: The Chief Judge's Man
Written by John Wagner. Illustrated by Will Simpson, Colin MacNeil, and John Burns.

Last time I wrote about 2000ad I said I'd wait until the next "all part ones" issue. But you know what? Screw that. Because for slightly more than the price of the average issue of 2000ad (£1.80) I can just buy collections from bookshops that sell everything for £2. Awesome!

Of course, unfortunately I start with one of the least interesting Judge Dredd comics I've read. Most of what I've read has been in random American reprints, so I really don't remember what I actually have read. Necropolis? with Judge Death? That was pretty good.

This, however, wasn't. It starts off with someone killing pro-democracy citizens of Mega-City One, and while Dredd isn't the biggest fan of democracy, he also doesn't like people breaking the law, so he goes after him.

Now, from the title you can probably guess that something fishy is going on with this killer, he's being told to kill these people by the Chief Judge. And I guess that's where my problem with this arises, I have no idea who any of the Judges that aren't Dredd are. There's a bunch of other Judges in this comic, and, presumbly, I'm supposed to know who at least some of them are? I know Dredd is an ongoing series, and has continuity, but I think this is only the second Dredd story from the last decade that I've read, so I really don't know. Is this in character for the Chief Judge? Iunno.

Anyway, there's some other stuff, and the prison's just outside of Mega-City One show up again (I last saw them in the most recent issue of 2000ad that I read), and it seems that those scenes are moving some larger plot forward.

There's also a kind of bizarre bit which seems retconned in. Maybe it was the intention from the beginning, but the killer suddenly having cockroach DNA just seems utterly ridiculous.

Meanwhile, in the art department, Colin MacNeil does a really good job on his part.



It's a bit static, and thus doesn't show movement/action that well, but that's frequently a problem with painted art. I think it looks pretty awesome. Maybe I should have bought that Devlin Waugh trade he did the art for.

Labels: 2000ad, comics

Jackie No. 580
Feb 15th, 1975

Earlier this year the Guardian newspaper gave away reprints of old comics published by IPC.

I used to read some of the comics they published back when I was a kid living in the UK, though, needless to say, I didn't read this one. Both because I wasn't born when it came out, and because it is for girls. Ick.

In fact Jackie is hardly a comic at all. There's only about six pages of actual comics in the whole thing. The rest of it is letters, short stories, agony aunts, pop star things, and other stuff that makes me glad I was not a girl who grew up reading something like this. Aiee.

The comics that are featured are both weeeeeeeeeeeird. The first one is all about how awesome and dreamy Donny Osmond is, though it features some nice art when it's not trying to replicate celebrities.


Just ignore her creepy, pupil-less, eyes.

The second one is even worse, and all about a girl trying to steal her best friend's boyfriend, leading to her friend's death. What a dick! Girls!

Jackie is strange, and I hope to never read it again. It does let me show this video though, which is pretty ace, and I feel a pretty accurate representation of this magazine.

Labels: comics, ipc

Never Learn Anything From History
by Kate Beaton

Oh man, these comics are awesome. I keep meaning to write about webcomics I read, but I never do. Clearly once they've released print books is the time to talk about them.

I will say once more, Kate Beaton's comics are awesome. So awesome I was willing to buy a book of them when I can (and did) just read them for free on the internet.

Beaton's comics are, mostly, comics about history. And while that doesn't sound very exciting, she is able to make it really funny. Mostly by taking real events, condensing them down to just a few panels, and making pretty much everyone act like an idiot. They are hilarious. Honest.

So this volume collects...a bunch of the comics from her website. Not all of them, I think due to quality problems and the like. Still, there's a lot here, and there's some commentary and the like. Though I think it's just the same stuff that was online.

So while the content is awesome, I had a couple of issues with the actual physical object. First it is expensive. Aieeeeee. $25? It's only like 80 pages or something. (Thankfully I got it at more than half off during a huge sale. Hurray!)

Also, I don't like the paper stock and the binding seems flimsy. I don't know if it is or not, but every time I open it, I am very careful because I am afraid the spine is going to break and all the pages are going to fall out. I don't want that to happen on a $25 book.

With this book Beaton decided to go the self publishing route (it kind of shows, there's not even a copyright notice in the book), and I'm guessing went through some sort of print-on-demand service, which a lot of webcomic people seem to use. I kind of wish they'd put more thought into this stuff. Or, alternatively, try to get someone else to publish it for them. Some publisher must have wanted to put this out right?

Anyway, here are links so you can go bask in her glory.

http://beatonna.livejournal.com/


http://www.harkavagrant.com/

!!! She's just put up a new one. Exciting.

Labels: comics, webcomics

Touch #1-2
Written by John Francis Moore. Illustrated by Wesley Craig and Prentis Rollins.

"Get ready for DC Focus, a new line of gritty, character-driven comics that take place in a world separate from the traditional DC universe."

Or don't. That was the info DC released about the Focus line of comics (way back in 2004). But it quickly became apparent that people were going to take the second option and just ignore them entirely.

Touch was apparently the one least interesting of all, as it debuted with sales of just over 11,000 (#151 on the charts), before sinking to just 5000 (and #223) with the sixth, and final, issue. Admittedly, it was barely behind another Focus title, Fraction, but that just shows how poorly this line was received.

Part of me wonders what DC were thinking with this line. There were no big creators, and while there was a push for the line, it didn't seem like there was any reason for it to exist.

Going back to 2004, when this line launched, we can see DC making a lot of these sort of strange publishing decisions, and putting out piles of comics not necessarily interesting to their typical superhero-comic-reading fan. This was, after all, when the ill-fated DC/2000ad and DC/Humanoids imprints were launched, and CMX, which somehow still exists despite putting out (to me) mystifying manga series.

It all kind of seems to indicate a period when DC was flailing around seemingly completely at random in an attempt to find something that would sell. It didn't work, so now they just put out more Green Lantern comics.

Still, who was the market for the Focus comics supposed to be? Based on the covers by indie comicker Tomer Hanuka, and the drab and murky colouring, I can only assume that the intended audience was indie/Vertigo readers.

Except that doesn't make any sense, because if you want to attract those readers, you should give the books to people that already have followings. Don't just get the guy that wrote X-Force and Doom 2099 (as good as it might have been) to write your titles*.

There's also the strangeness behind launching an entire line of comics (which I'm not sure has ever really succeeded before, it's not like Vertigo just showed up one day), with line-branding, similar covers, style, and colouring, fairly generic names, and yet not have any information inside the comics telling you about the others. The house ads are all for other DC comics, and the back of issue two just tells you about a bunch of DC universe titles. Had DC already given up on the line by that point? I don't know.

The colouring on these comics is another mystifying idea. The entire line supposedly had a drab, washed out look, which doesn't sound like the best idea but could work. It doesn't though. Well, that's unfair. There are scenes where it works, the opening pages of issue one are at the bottom of a mine shaft, and the dark colours work pretty well there. When someone breaks through to rescue the miners he's backlit with brighter colours, and it looks pretty good. The rest of the issue is coloured with the exact same colours (grey-blue and grey-red), no matter if they characters are walking down the street, in a bar, in a hospital, inside, outside, wherever. It's like the movie Dark City, where everything happens at night, except with no point or reason. It's the rare comic that has more colour on the cover than the insides, but this is one of them. Issue two seems even worse, with the red becoming even greyer.



It's like there was a coloured ink shortage.

The comic itself is alright. A guy has superstrength, and helps people. Well, for the right price for him and his manager. The first issue ends with you learning that the hero isn't the main character after all, he's just been given his powers by someone else. And what can be given can be taken away. It's a decent twist, and it actually makes me appreciate the cover (which I thought was pretty good to begin with) a lot more.

The second issue goes into this a bit more, and I guess the point of the series was sort of like Dial H for Hero, except with the mystery of how this guy got his powers. And who that crazy dude in the second issue was. Were either of these mysteries solved? I dunno. And I kind of doubt I will ever actually find out. It does not however seem like the plot for an ongoing series.

One final thing to mention is that only five years ago DC launched an entire line of comics at $2.50 each. It's kind of hard to believe that in the five years since then we've gone from that price up to the $3.99 that so many comics now launch at. Still, I'm sure I'll be able to buy them from a quarter bin in five years time no matter how much they originally cost.

*That's who wrote (and created, and even, according to the indica, had some of the copyright of) Touch, by the way: John Francis Moore. And that's true up above too, I did generally enjoy his run on Doom 2099. It wasn't a masterpiece or anything, but I thought it was pretty fun comics.

Labels: DC, Focus, I will spend 25 cents on anything

New Warriors #1
By Fabian Nicieza and Mark Bagley

Wow, part of me can't believe this comic is so old. 19 years! Holy crap! That is probably older than some of these characters are meant to be.

Um, so yeah. It's a Marvel superhero team comic. It does what it does pretty well, introduces the characters, makes me wonder why Kid Nova (when did he start/stop using "kid"?) has such a terrible costume, why anyone knows who Namorita is, and who the hell invented Night Thrasher. Why the hell does this rich guy with computers and a suit of armour ride a skateboard?

(In related news, go read about Dwayne McDuffie's pitch for Teenage Negro Ninja Thrashers.)

I actually don't know much about these characters, but this series is supposed to be pretty good. This issue didn't blow me away, but I'm willing to check out further issues in quarter bins in the future...

Other things I read recently that I barely remember.

Bloody Mary #1
Garth Ennis. Carlos Ezquerra.

Oh man. Helix. Remember that? No? Well I don't either. It was a sci-fi imprint that from DC that crashed and burned pretty fast (like pretty much every imprint that just starts one day). I think Transmetropolitan was the only thing that made it out alive (transferred to Vertigo) and I don't know if anything else is even in print right now.

(I just looked it up on Wikipedia, and woah. It lasted over two years? That makes all of DC's more recent imprints that have died in less than a year (Focus, Minx, something else I'm sure I've forgotten) look like even bigger failures.)

Anyway, this is really just Garth Ennis war comics in the future. It's pretty good. I'm surprised there isn't a trade of it out. Oh wait, apparently Vertigo put one out like four years ago. Why didn't the comic shop I work in have that? I guess nobody remembers Helix.

Some Batman comic with Anarky
Just. Argh. No.

Some of those end of the world Wildstorm comics: I do not remember which ones.
Hey, these were pretty good (as usual). Though the art in the Gen13 interlude issue (by Dan Hipp) was definitely not as good as the work the regular artist Mike Huddleston was doing. It's not bad or anything, just probably not what superhero comic fans actually want to see.

Labels: comics, DC, Helix, I will spend 25 cents on anything, Marvel, Wildstorm

What better place than Quebec to read the last bit of The Metabarons in English that I had yet to read? Well, France I guess, but I more than likely wouldn't have been able to find it in English there. And I read this on the bus between Kingston and Montreal, so maybe I read it in Ontario.

Regardless! We most carry on.

The Metabarons: Alpha/Omega
By Charest, Joworowsky, Gimenez & Moebius (what an interesting order for the cover)

So while I really liked the Metabarons comic that Humanoids was putting out back in the day (2000-2002!) I never picked this up, because it was like $15, for 48 pages. Aieee! That was practically the price of the oversized hardcovers Humanoids was putting out. However, when I recently found it for $3, I decided to pick it up.

And hell, I am super glad I didn't spend $15 on this thing. It's three short stories, and an except from the book Charest was doing with Jodorowsky at the time.

(Which he didn't even finish! After completing only 30 pages in seven years, Humanoids got some other guy, with a completely different style, to finish drawing it. I looked through a copy of it in a book store in Montreal, and Charest's stuff is beautiful, but I can't believe how slow it was to produce that work.)

But three of those things are basically the same story with different artists! First Moebius draws it (from his work on the Incal, and terribly recoloured), then Gimenez draws it (and damn, does he ever draw better robots) in an early Metabarons piece that apparently isn't in continuity anymore. Then Charest draws it! Admittedly, Charest's preview does feature a bunch of other stuff, and his version of the scene is gorgeous, but still!

The first story (also drawn by Gimenez) is unrelated to the others (!!!) and acts as a prequel of sorts to the whole Metabarons story. It's filled with the ridiculous things that most Jodorowsky comics have, but didn't really do much for me. Dunno.

The original Metabarons series never finished coming out in English. After Humanoids stopped publishing the issues/collections, DC republished the collections, but didn't finish it either.

Devil's Due currently have the license to publish the Metabarons in English, but I think it's been almost a year since they started publishing Humanoids stuff, and they haven't got very much of it out. To be honest, it's been so long since I read the series, I'm not sure if I'd even read the end. This volume made me wonder why I liked the series so much in the first place, and since I don't have my old issues anymore, maybe I will never find out.

Labels: comics

Macedonia: What does it take to stop a war?
Written by Harvey Pekar and Heather Roberson
Illustrated by Ed Piskor

Fuck, this book is dense. Crazy dense! It's mostly 12 panel pages filllled with text. And sometimes they can't even fit enough text into those, so they put in even more text. I'm not saying it's not good, but I guess I had just forgotten how many words Pekar crams into his comics.

And despite the co-writer, this really does seem like a Pekar comic. Because it is filled with words! And impossible to read in one sitting! I like American Splendor, but I think I've read enough for my life.

However, I clearly haven't read enough non-fiction comics about the former Yugoslavia (I mean, I haven't even read all of Joe Sacco's comics on the area!), and this one definitely delivers on giving you piles and piles of information about a country you more than likely know nothing about.

I find these comics kind of depressing, as I feel as though I am doing nothing to help the world. It's even worse when I consider that I've been in Eastern Europe and SE Asia, which are other places that deal with the corruption and racism that are some of the focal points of what is going on in the Balkans. Why am I sitting on my friend's bed writing about a comic? Why aren't I doing something to really benefit people? Fuck, I am so old (26!) and I don't feel I've really accomplished anything yet (more than many people, but what positive things have I really done?). Refusing to take part in society makes it incredibly hard to change it. And I am frequently left wondering what I can actually do to help the world.

Um, so freak out over.

I'm really curious as to how this comic was weird. Roberson went to Macedonia for her undergrad (!!!) thesis (making me feel like I accomplished nothing doing mine), and the comic shows her taking lots of notes, and recording interviews and her own opinions on things. Presumably she then gave these notes (and thesis) to Pekar, who turned it into a comic script and gave it to Piskor to draw. Did this happen? I really don't know. The book doesn't say, and I'm clearly too lazy to look up interviews. The book also lacks bios for anyone other than Pekar, which just seems weird.

It's good, read it if you want to know about Macedonia.

Labels: comics

All New Savage She-Hulk #1

For a character that's only ever shown up twice before, there's an oddly large amount of backstory here (and eight pages of interviews to talk about it!). It's sort of generic. Time travelling. Fighting some group of soldiery people who's name I forget (HAMMER? SWORD?). I liked the bits in the future with the tribe of women fighting the tribe of people that look kind of like primitive, cut-rate Wolverines. Worth a dollar, not $4 (which is the cover price).

Runaways Vol 3, #11

Noooooooooooooooo! Nooooooooooooooo! Noooooooooooooo!

I was all ready to enjoy Runaways again after the relaunch with Terry Moore writing failed to interest me at all (I read the first issue and I think that was it). This was Katheryn (Patsy Walker: Hellcat) Immonen's first issue, and it even started promisingly, the characters talked more like how I remembered, the art was good, everyone was just hanging out, which is probably what this book should be about as none of the characters want to be superheroes, but then...

But then Immonen had to kill one of my favourite characters. Hell, who am I kidding, I like all of these characters, but so many of them have died in this series already. Stop killing the characters! No! Just stop it. I hate you. I hope that character isn't dead. I guess I'll look for more issues (and I'll probably even read the stuff I missed at some point), but I really don't want more characters in this comic to die. It makes me sad.

Update! Since originally writing this I've read the first trade of Terry Moore's run (bizarrely only including six of his nine issues), which wasn't very good, and heard about/seen some of the final issue of the current run (#14).

The art looks not very good, the colouring is less than awesome (apparently coloured on a laptop at cons), and these combine to create some of the least Asian Nico panels I've seen. Plus the story just stops, it doesn't end. It's just the end of the comic. It seems as though Marvel just cancelled the series before this writer's story could end. Though admittedly this was solicited as a four part story.

Oh well, maybe next time.

Labels: comics, Marvel, One dollar theatre

Sandman Mystery Theatre: Dr. Death and The Night of the Butcher

(This is a terrible review made from random notes about a comic I read weeks ago.)

These stories are an improvement over the last couple I remember reading. The Night of the Butcher genuinely had me wondering what would happen next, and I was glad I wasn't reading the series as a monthly.

I liked that the villains in these stories weren't who you expected them to be. The earlier stories really seemed to telegraph which character appearing was the bad guy, so it was nice to be somewhat surprised. It also made the detective work done by both the Sandman and the police make more sense as they had to work to find out about the criminal, as opposed to just stumbling upon whatever.

I also enjoyed the Sandman's relationship with the police: hatred from one, partial trust from another. It sort of made sense in a real world sort of way.

Dian's reactions to what she experienced in this volume also seemed more "real" than what you get in most super hero comics. She doesn't immediately accept what was going on, and has to think about what she's going to do. At least days and possibly loner pass while the characters just think about things.

I'm not really sure what's going on with the art. The title page of the trade credits David Hornung as colourist, but the title pages for each story just say "art by," while the letterist is named. It's weird, but I guess it just means "pencils and ink" and my brain just melted.

While Guy Davis is an artist who's work I have enjoyed on the BPRD comics from Darkhorse, I preferred the art in the first story of this volume where Davis just did the layouts and Vince Locke did "art," whatever that means.

There's one part in the second story, which Davis illustrates it all himself, where a woman finds...something in her toilet. What is it? I have absolutely no idea. It's a bloody something. It's only a couple of pages later that someone says what it is, but even once you know it doesn't really help you identify the drawing.

The colouring!

(Yes this is important in this comic.)

The colouring in the first story is far better (and brighter!) than the second. It wasn't that noticeable while I read both stories, but flipping through the book there's a huge difference.

Colouring in the second story is really weird. People's skin tones just seem to be white. Entirely white, not coloured at all. It looks really strange and I wondered if it was a printing error or something. Considering the colourist was supposed to be the same for both stories in this volume, I really have to wonder what happened.

Baker Street

This is an earlier Guy Davis work, and it's...not so good. Considering there don't seem to be that many comics about the punk scene in general, and even fewer where there is any actual knowledge of the scene involved, it seems weird that Davis, who apparently was in the punk scene, would do something like this weird mashup of Victoriana and punks. I only managed to read the first issue of the trade cause I didn't think it was that good.

Labels: comics, Vertigo

Oooh, a review of last week's issue of 2000ad, exactly what you want to read. Especially since if you really wanted to read one, you'd probably have gone to this site.

But, no matter, here it is anyway. Mostly because I was so excited to buy an issue of this off the news-stand, something I had never done before in my times visiting/living in the UK/Ireland. (Which is where I currently am.)

For those that don't know, 2000ad is a weekly sci-fi anthology comic that has been published in England forever and ever and ever. It's on issue 1654, I can't even understand that.

Judge Dredd: Tour of Duty part 5
Dredd is in the Cursed Earth doing some prison thing. It's written by John Wagner, so even before reading, you know it's more than likely going to be good, as he's one of the people who created Dredd and has been writing him since issue two or whenever Dredd first appeared. There's some weird caption stuff going on here, where it seems like it sh/could be internal narration/a character thinking. But than later on the captions refer to that character in the third person. So I dunno.
And yeah, it's pretty good. Probably the best thing in the issue. The art by Colin MacNeil is pretty good. I like the robot dressed in Judge gear, though I wish we'd gotten to see a full body shot.

Kingdom: Call of the Wild part 5
This one didn't really do much for me. The main character seems to be mentally delayed in some way. He always speaks in terrible English, and doesn't seem to understand things. Not really a character I want to read about. The character I would like to read more about is the human character who's apparently been held hostage by some mutant people things for two years. Or the other mutants, even if some of them look like Tank Girl kangaroo people.

Strontium Dog: The Mork Whisperer part 4
Strontium Dog is another of the comics that has been in 2000ad forever. It hasn't been in every issue (I think Dredd has), but it's there fairly frequently. It's about a mutant bounty hunter travelling the galaxy, and while I probably should like it, I don't really get the appeal to be honest. It's alright, but I didn't really dig the art (or maybe just the colouring). I mean, it is drawn by Carlos Ezquerra, who's stuff I usually enjoy.
I think Johnny Alpha (the main character) looks like Jesse Custer from Preacher without his armour on.

Shakara: Destroyer part 5

Wow, now this has nice art. Or at least this first floating thing is.



(Yes, I have access to a scanner now.)

The other character designs don't do much for me. And the comic doesn't do much to explain why Robbie Morrison has multiple strips in this issue and is fairly well known as a 2000ad writer. His run on the Authority was super horrible. It's just a big robot fight scene! With teknosaurs! I do not know why I don't like it.

Nikolai Dante: Lulu's War part 4
This is Robbie Morrison's better known comic in 2000ad, and it's actually good. The so called lead "Nikolai Dante" doesn't actually show up, but I have no idea who that is so it doesn't matter. This comic is set in some weird future version of Russia with tsars and the like? I think. I am not sure.
This is good though. Vampires, corrupt aristocrats, some woman who seems to have magical powers with insects for blood or something. I would read more of this. Too bad this is the last part!

Overall? It was alright. I only really liked two of the stories, and the Nikolai Dante one is going to be in the next issue. I think I will wait for one of those periodic issues where every story is a part one before I pick this up again.

Labels: 2000ad, comics