Showing posts with label super-powers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label super-powers. Show all posts

Monday, October 1, 2018

Invincible Iron Man by Brian Michael Bendis, Stefano Caselli, Kate Niemczyk, Taki Soma, Kiichi Mizushima, Marte Gracia, Israel Silva


Rating: WORTHY!

So I read the second volume of the Ironheart graphic novel - this is the one featuring a female (a young female - she's only fifteen, but already a brilliant student at MIT). I had some minor issues with this volume. It's supposed to be about this girl who is replacing Ironman, so I was disappointed to discover that the title made no mention whatsoever of Ironheart!

The first volume at least had the title as "Invincible Iron Man Ironheart" which was bad enough (it made no sense for one thing), but volume two excludes the Ironheart bit altogether, like the comic isn't even about her! WTF, Marvel? There really is no point in promoting a female super hero if all you're going to do with her is render her as an appendage of the previous male hero to hold that title. It defeats the purpose, you know? For goodness sake let her fly solo. And don't treat your readers like idiots who would have no clue that Ironheart is a female incarnation of Iron Man without you spelling it out on the cover - because clearly you have no faith in the cover illustrations accomplishing that aim! LOL!

That aside, the overall story wasn't too bad, although it lapsed a bit here and there. Tony Stark's AI presence is nothing but an annoyance to me. If it was amusing, that would be something, but it isn't, and having so many types of speech balloon (one for Riri suited-up, one for her out of suit, one for Tony, one for Friday?) means it's a mess. Clean it up!

At one point I actually wondered if I'd be able to give this a favorable rating, but then it picked up and it saved itself enough that I'm willing to pursue this at least as far as volume three. One of my problems with it, and this applies to more than this one comic, is Marvel's lack of imagination in creating new villains. DC is just as bad. Let's resurrect the Joker again why don't we? Never mind how many times we killed him off, let's really keep digging back into the ancient past and bring out the same villains over and over instead of going to the trouble of using our imagination and creativity. Barf. The Joker is a joke. The Riddler is ridiculous. Catwoman is a pussy and the Penguin is for the birds. Find a new shtick!

This volume did change it up a bit in that the two main villains were females, but they were female versions (in effect) of male villains. Instead of the endlessly returning Doctor Doom, we got a female clone: a psychotic despot who was queen of Latveria of all places. Seriously? Get a new shtick, Marvel. At least, as temporary queen of Latveria, after defeating this idiot non-entity of a villain, Ironheart shone. Later Ironheart went up against Lady Octopus (and to her credit made fun of her title - this was one of the things which amused me and brought the novel back into my favor.

I'm happy to say that despite the lack of any female writing input, the art wasn't appallingly genderist, perhaps due to the presence of Kate Niemczyk and Taki Soma on the team, but it's still not enough. I am still hoping for better, but for now this isn't too bad.


Invincible Iron Man Ironheart by Brian Michael Bendis, Stefano Caselli, Marte Gracia


Rating: WORTHY!

I tend not to read many super hero comics because they often rub me up the wrong way and the poses the artists put the characters into all-too-often seem utterly unnatural when they're not uninventive, and the sexualization, particularly of females is not acceptable to me. Plus the dialog is a bit lame - especially when the heroes are exchanging smart-ass remarks in the middle of a fight. It's thoroughly unrealistic - even given the premise that superheroes exist - so it's not my cup of gamma ray-infused kryptonite, but once in a while I do read one for better or for worse. This one was for better as it happens, although there is still much to be done here.

This one threatened to annoy me from the cover alone because despite it being about Iron Man's replacement (in this comic world Iron Man is dead - at least as much as any super hero or villain is ever dead in these things), the female who is taking over still doesn't get top billing, although her 'real' name curiously appears on the cover at the bottom of the page. Normally I pay little attention to covers because the author has little or nothing to do with them and the artist typically hasn't even read the novel, as judged by how irrelevant or clueless the cover art is, but in graphic novels it's different: the cover does matter.

J Scott Campbell's risible (if it were not so serious) 2016 cover that caused such a controversy when it was revealed is almost as inexcusable as his being in total brain-dead denial about what an inappropriate cover it was. Marvel seems to have learned a lesson from that, but there are more they still need to learn - like hiring an artist who is a black woman maybe to draw Ironheart instead of yet another white dude? Was Nilah Magruder not available? Yona Harvey? Anyone? Ferrous Jewels?! There have to be scores of young black female artists who would love a shot at this. Afua Richardson? Taneka Stotts? It's important - it just needs to become important to the comic book corporations: not important to say, but important to actually do!

And what's with the name Ironheart? It was the name of a Japanese soft-porn knock-off of Iron Man and the content was certainly not appropriate to link to a fifteen-year-old black woman who's set to become a hero. What was wrong with Iron Girl? Was it ever considered? Tony Stark is cleared to be an Iron Man, but Riri isn't cleared to be a girl? Well, I guess not according to J Scott Campbell she isn't!

The story shows Riri - who is purportedly a genius, creating her own suit and starting out as a self-made woman, finally being mentored by Tony Stark's AI, and befriending Pepper Potts who is also a super hero now. The story was upbeat, fun and enjoyable, but there's much more to this incarnation of the Iron Hero. I enjoyed this comic and felt that Riri had a voice worth hearing, but maybe others will disagree. Pre-orders for this comic series slowly fell after issue one. I can't help but wonder if this was because the female wasn't quite so sexualized after that outcry or maybe it was something else. Maybe the writing isn't there. Maybe the plotting isn't, but I intend to read more of this story and see where it goes. I commend this issue at least.


Mister Miracle by Tom King, Mitch Gerads


Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I was truly disappointed in this. I tried to overlook the juvenile naming conventions which were put in place long before this volume was created: the 'super hero' being named Scott Free, and the abysmally brain-dead 'Apokolips', and focused on the story which was supposedly about escape artist 'Mister Miracle' being able to escape anything. The story began with an interview about how he had escaped death and this, despite telling us nothing, was the most coherent part of the story. After that it became a two-hundred page nonsensical drag.

The artwork and coloring was a mixed bag and the story boring, meandering, and directionless. The blurb informed me that there would be no ending (THIS IS AN INCOMPLETE PROOF OF THE BOOK ONLY CONTAINING CHAPTERS 1-10). I'm not sure why they would put it out there with no ending, but I was willing to accept that. I'd never read anything about Mister Miracle or his wife 'Big Barda' before, so I thought it would be interesting to me, but it really wasn't. Other than the fact that the hero is married, there was nothing new or different here. There was oddity which I speculated was explained by his purportedly cheating death, but the artwork which I think was supposed to convey this really wasn't pleasant to look at.

There were parts of it that were blurry with the colors not registering correctly and after a short while I realized this was deliberate, but it wasn't appreciated, and was nauseating to look at. I do not know what sort of effect the creators were going for here but it was a fail with me. There were also panels which appeared to be from a TV transmission, and far from giving us "a new take" here, we got the same ridiculous representation with scan lines on the image - like this was a low-res cathode ray TV and not a modern one. I've never found that appealing, not remotely. It's not even intelligent and it certainly isn't new. Instead, it's trope and it's tired.

I can't tell you what the story was about because despite reading all of it, I couldn't tell myself. I can tell you it was disjointedly all over the place, and it made no sense. There was endless talk of raging battles and frequent scenes of massed people fighting, but these were interspersed with laughably domestic scenes. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Big Barda is so pregnant that the baby is due, and then we got endless pages of the delivery which was tiresome. I have no idea where that came from since there was no lead-in to it.

The leader of the fighting forces for which Mister Miracle and Big Barda fought was a psychotic and the fact the Miracle and wife (who was very much secondary to him) failed to see this, told me they were profoundly stupid; far too stupid to successfully raise a child. The kindest thing I can say about this is that maybe it represents one long dream sequence somehow induced by Miracle's supposedly escaping death (or while he's in process of escaping it), but that trope is so tired it's pathetic, if that's what it was. Even if that's what it was, it lacked any kind of a pretense at coherence and so made for tedious reading.

We're told in the blurb that Mister Miracle "even caught the attention of the Justice League, who has counted him among its ranks." That's not only poor grammar, it's irrelevant to this story in which (or should I say in who?!) I saw no redeeming feature at all. Miracle's costume makes him look reminiscent of Iron Man, and since the latter precedes the former by almost a decade, some serious thought ought to be devoted to giving Mister Miracle a makeover. That would have made this story at least a little bit different. As it was, all it was, was more of the same and that's not good enough. I can't rate this positively.


Sunday, July 1, 2018

World of Wakanda by Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alitha E Martinez, Roberto Poggi


Rating: WORTHY!

Is it just me, or did anyone else find it rather amusing that a writer named Gay tells a story here of a lesbian couple? Okay, just me then! Sorry! But Roxane Gay is bisexual for clarification and she was the lead writer here with Coates. This was a graphic novel and I was quite taken by it. The art (Martinez, Poggi) was glorious and the story was engaging and inspiring. It tells of earlier days of Dora Milaje than those depicted in the monumentally successful movie - days when Ayo is newly arrived in the guard and undergoing training. She and her trainer, Aneka, fall for each other and have to fight their confusion as well as each other when training.

Full disclosure: I was in love with Ayo before Aneka was! Not that it will do me any good, but after I saw that scene in Captain America: Civil War in which she says - to Black Widow of all people! - "Move or you will be moved" I was solid gone and wanted to see more of her. She had little to do in Black Panther unfortunately and less to do in Avengers: Infinity Wars, but at least I get to see her in this comic!

This story tells of the two's transition from Dora Milaje to their current comic persona as vigilantes known as Midnight Angels. Gay and Yona Harvey, who wrote a short story depicted in the back of this volume, are the first two black women to write a series for Marvel. Sadly the series was cancelled, so as far as I know, this is all there is. It's well worth a look.


Valiant High by Daniel Kibblesmith


Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a lightweight and fluffy story of some of Valiant's superheroes as they were in high-school, but it's not Superboy - far from it. It was fun and light, and active, and well-drawn and scripted, so I had a good time with it. It was really nice to see Faith in her element and to see her respected and treated as a human being, not as a weight problem, which I've never seen her as anyway. The other characters I confess I was not familiar with - or if I ever was, I've forgotten them.

The nice thing about this is that it's a PG-13 kind of a story so anyone can read it. There's some high-school jinks, some kissing, some action, and cartoonish violence, the occasional oddball fantasy creature, but there's nothing I wouldn't let my kids see. Not that they're very much into comic books! The main protagonists are Amanda "Livewire" McKee and her best friend, Faith "Zephyr" Herbert, and Faith never looked more present than she does here bringing hope and charity wherever she goes. Amanda is pretty cool too, but I'm a Faith fanboy what can I say?! I recommend this if you're into the Valiant hero world at all.


Friday, June 1, 2018

Accell Volume 2: Pop Quiz by Joe Casey, Damion Scott, Robert Campanella


Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I read the first volume of Accell and quite enjoyed it, but this volume simply did not resonate. It was all over the place, and the artwork was indifferent, so there nothing that special to look at or to read. Accell himself isn't a very impressive character. He's very self-absorbed and self-important, and he objectifies women (maybe it should have been titled Pop tart given the female character who's introduced?). On the other hand, given his jackass of a girlfriend, maybe some of this is understandable.

She was an unrelenting nag, and yet he had no spine to ask her to back-off or to lay it on the line that if she doesn't quit this endless complaining, he was going to be getting out of this relationship; then we get this other girl who's presented as stereotypically evil, but she's not really. It appeared to be a ham-fisted change of wind in relationships, but even that went nowhere. Overall the story was like a day in the life of a superhero, but it was a derivative and boring day.

This character borrows too much from DC's The Flash, and brings nothing new. The guy is supposed to be faster than sound, but there's never a sonic boom when he takes off, and never any complaints about one! And where are the other heroes in this world? Do none of them ever show up to help out a fellow hero when a bad guy turns up? I guess not. I wasn't at all impressed by this outing and I cannot recommend it. I'm done with this graphic novel world.


Friday, May 18, 2018

Black Panther Doomwar by Jonathan Maberry


Rating: WARTY!

Drawn and colored by an assortment of evidently uninspired and certainly unimaginative artists, this was several volumes in one compendium and I wasn't impressed. I picked it up at the library because I'd loved the Black Panther movie and the wealth of strong female characters. When I saw that this book was about Shuri - the Black Panther's kid sister, who was now filling the role of the Panther after her brother had been injured, I thought it would be well-worth reading, but written and drawn by largely, if perhaps not exclusively male writers and artists, it turned out to be yet another disturbing and lackluster venture into boring objectification of female super heroes.

The villain is Doctor Doom. How utterly tedious! Can they not find a new villain? If not, then could they not at least find a villain from Black Panther's own history to resurrect? One of the biggest problems with comic books and a good reason why we see them tailing off is the total inability of their creators to bring something truly new to the table. They keep resurrecting - often literally - vanquished villains from ancient history, and it would be laughable were it not so tiresome.

Worse than this (and don't even get me started on the kitchen sink cameos from other 'heroes' of the Marvel stable), Shuri's form-fitting black costume makes her - a black woman - look like she's naked, and her unnatural postures in far too many frames seemed drawn by adolescent boys for no other purpose than to titillate rather than inform or impress.

It is truly and honestly tiresome to see this kind of unhip-dysplasic and scoliosis-ridden posing from female characters affecting stances that would be downright painful to strike were a real person to attempt them, with hips and asses thrust out unnaturally, and deliberately provocatively. When we see nothing remotely like those poses from the male super heroes, you know this is pure objectification. It's outright genderist and it's to be shunned and boycotted in my opinion. I dis-recommend this entire series.


Saturday, April 14, 2018

The Feros by Wesley King


Rating: WARTY!

Here's yet another from my overblown collection of print books that I've picked up from all over the place. This one was bad, folks. Really bad! It's yet another middle-grade (or maybe young adult but it read like middle-grade) story of kids with super powers. I believe it's book two of a series but this wasn't apparent from the book cover. I guess they're trying to hide that secret!

I could not make it past the start of chapter two which began: "Lana sprinted down the long hallway, her legs pumping beneath her." Her legs were beneath her? Whoah! What a mid-blowing concept. I guess that's her super power - having her legs are beneath her. Hey author, why not simply, "Lana sprinted down the long hallway"?

That was bad enough, but there was another gem to come just one more sentence later: "When she approached the opening, she burst through." Not when she reached the opening, not when she arrived at the opening, not even simply, "She burst through the opening," but when she approached the opening she burst through! That's her superpower! She can burst through something before she actually gets there! She only has to approach it!

I've written like that - when I'm parodying stories like this (Baker Street comes to mind), but I don't expect to actually read that in a purportedly seriously-written book. I stopped right there because I know when I have this much of an issue with a novel and I'm barely started on chapter two, that me and the novel are not going to work out.

It's better to make a clean break so both sides know it's over, so I said "Let's part as strangers," and I walked away. I'm going to apologize up front for inflicting this book as a donation to this little village library near where I live, but maybe someone who hopes for less in the writing than I do, will like it. Maybe someone, somewhere, somehow, will approach it and burst through it. I know I can't.


Sunday, April 1, 2018

Justice League Vol 1 Origin by Geoff Johns, Jim Lee, Scott Williams, Alex Sinclair


Rating: WARTY!

This is yet another reboot in an endless series of reboots. The New 52 was launched in 2011, essentially trashing everything that had gone before and rebooting all the DC Comics super heroes. This was revamped again in 2015, and then again in 2016 with a "rebirth' - isn't that what the New 52 was supposed to have been? Even within these so-called continuities, characters have been reborn and made-over endlessly to the point where it becomes completely meaningless.

So it's within that milieu that this rebirth of the Justice League - still using the antique name, note - that this comic arrived, and it really wasn't very entertaining. It's just endless fighting and that's not something I'm interested in. They're going to have to reboot again if they don't soon get a clue that endless fighting isn't entertaining unless you're a complete moron. They seem to be getting that in the movies now, but apparently not in the comics.

This was as poorly executed as the DC movies have been, although the recent (as of this writing) movie of the Justice League was much better and far more amusing than this comic was. The comic precedes all of the ill-conceived DC 'universe' movies (which officially began with Man of Steel in 2013), and you can see some of the ideas in this (or similar DC comics) have made it into the movies, such as Wonder Woman's love affair with 'ice cream' from her own movie, which for me is still the scintillating gem in the sadly tarnished DC movie crown. The 'demon' flying characters in the Justice League seem to have also been lifted from this or a similar story.

This story is an origin tale - not of the individual characters in it, but of the Justice League itself, and it's a pretty sad and dysfunctional story. We have Aquaman, Batman, Cyborg, Flash, Green Lantern, Superman, and Wonder Woman joining forces (or in the case farces) to defeat Darkseid the laughable villain featured in the movie.

The drawing (Jim Lee), inking (lead by Scott Williams), and coloring (lead by Alex Sinclair) were actually not bad at all, but the story honestly sucked. It begins with Batman and Green Lantern fighting, then they go find Superman and fight him; then Flash arrives and fights Superman. Aquaman shows up and starts bitching about Green Lantern who bitches about him in return. And so on, rinse and repeat. It's boring. It's juvenile. It's not a story at all. It's more like watching little kids play with their 'action figures' (read dolls - we all had them!), which is all this writer is doing, apparently.

The problem with this comic is that Geoff Johns wrote the entire story as one of endless fighting (between the super heroes), and of sniping, bickering, whining, and complaining, and it's not pretty and it's not entertaining. It makes these super heroes look like kids in a playground. Wonder Woman here is depicted as she traditionally has been, which means either in a skimpy skirt, or in a pair of bikini briefs. In this case it's the briefs and she looks idiotic. She didn't look that much better in the movie, but at least she had an excuse for her all-too-brief costume there.

Supergirl dresses exactly the same way, and that's one reason why I never did start watching that dumb show after I saw the pilot. Skimpy skirt, thigh high boots, and dark panty hose? Seriously? Is she a super hero or a dom? God forbid, after all the prattling about DC liberating the female super hero with Wonder Woman, that we should bring any other females to the big screen like Supergirl or Bat Woman! Not that Marvel is any better, but at least they do have a cadre of kick-ass females prominently featured in the movies they have released, especially after Black Panther brought us four who could hold their own in a movie (or four!). And god forbid we have the same characters on the TV and in the movies! Now they have two flashes? Two jokers? This is one reason I'm not overly fond of the DC world.

The only one who looks good as depicted in this comic is the Flash, who I've always thought has a really cool costume, which was ruined in the DC TV series. That's another DC comics TV representation that I actually watched for a while until I grew bored with the repetitiveness of it. Every season became exactly the same as the previous season: flash has to go up against some dude who's faster than he is. How pathetic! How boring!

In Arrow there was never-ending kung-fu fighting every single episode which was so ridiculous. If they'd taken a gun (even a stun-gun!) to a kung fu fight they would have been done with every fight in thirty seconds, but no, we have to stage the same fight sequences over and endlessly over again and let the villains escape. And the villain is always Damien Darhk. Barf. What's with these dumb-ass spellings? Darkseid? Dahrk? Give me a break! These are juvenile.

Worse, we have to have mind-numbingly endless flashbacks to the boring time Oliver spent on the island? Barf squared. Get a clue DC! Get some originality into your shows and movies. For my money, the only DC TV shows worth watching are Legends of Tomorrow which is hilarious and has kick-ass characters and fun plots - despite the Damien barf Darhk never-ending villain crap, and Gotham, which is just plain awesome. Apart from that, you can keep DC for me.

This comic is symptomatic of that lack of a clue - or that is symptomatic of the boring same-old, same-old world the comics purvey. Or is is Saiym-Ohlde, Saiym-Ohlde? One or the other. I cannot support this clueless puerile crap, and I will not recommend it. DC seriously needs a new shtick and they need it badly. The new 52 ain't cutting it. I'm forced to conclude that 52 is its IQ.


Friday, March 23, 2018

Gamora: Memento Mori by Nicole Perlman, Marco Checchetto, Andres Mossa


Rating: WARTY!

I wanted to like this - I really did, but from the unnecessarily sexualized full first page image of Gamora, my stomach started turning. One reason I picked this up was because it was written by a woman (Nicole Perlman who co-wrote the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie); the problem was that it was drawn by a guy (Marco Checchetto). Maybe it if had been the other way around, it would not have been so bad? Once that first image was done though, the depictions did seem to improve, but the story never really did.

Gamora is given a 'gift' by her adoptive father: the knowledge of where the people are who wiped out her own people. After she slaughters all of the royal lineage, she seems to think the job is done but she's not fulfilled. Why killing the royals would destroy their society is a complete mystery which is never gone into in the writing which is sadly very sketchy. Would they not simply appoint a new lineage or open elections? It's not like if the British royal family were all wiped-out Britain would simply fall apart and come to an end! Ad how does she know she's got them all? They all look exactly alike - how do you tell royalty from commoner?

As it happens, she didn't get them all. Gamora discovers that this highly patriarchal society has a princess - the last of these supposedly crucial people of the royal bloodline, and so after torturing one of the lizard people, she embarks on her own crusade to kill this last royal. It's all downhill from there. The story made zero sense. If these people - the green lizards, literally do smother all female children at birth as we're told, then how do they ever procreate? It made absolutely no sense whatsoever! With whom did the king mate to produce this princess? Apparently the author doesn't care because she never mentions it.

I loved Guardians of the Galaxy, but now I find myself wondering what parts of it, exactly, did this author write because it was far more entertaining, thoughtful, and provocative than this graphic novel ever was. The story could have been a truly engaging one, but it got lost somewhere along the way and never improved. I cannot recommend it.


Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Wonder Woman Warbringer by Leigh Bardugo


Rating: WARTY!

This is the first book in a series of four novels (not graphic!) based on DC icons. I don't know all of them, but I believe two of the others are Catwoman: Soulstealer by Sarah J. Maas (author of the execrable Throne of Glass which I panned) and Batman: Nightwalker by Marie Lu (author of the execrable Legend which I panned!). The rule here seems to be that if you write a really bad YA romance trilogy, then you can get a contract from DC comics! This is why I favor Marvel!

Leigh Bardugo is of course the author of the execrable Shadow and Bones which I also panned, so why am I reading (read: listening to) this? I admit I thought twice about picking up this volume precisely because of the author, but I was curious to see how she would handle something which wasn't her own creation. She mishandled it badly, making Wonder Woman look like some clueless, air-headed teenager. Wonder Woman Warbringer? Crappy title as well! Not that the 'warbringer' referred to WW.

At this point I am convinced that Bardugo simply cannot create intelligent female characters, but I started out by being honestly curious as to what she would do with such a being (and especially so, now Wonder Woman's profile has been raised so high by the excellent Patty Jenkins movie). This novel came out in 2017 - the same year as the Wonder Woman movie, and what a contrast here is between the two! Bardugo has another disaster on her hands.

This one started out seeming like it was just another origin story, and it completely contradicted the one told in the movie, which as far as I'm concerned is canon at this point - especially since the comic books are always retelling their stories. Seriously? If there's one thing we really do not need more of, it's super hero origin stories!

I don't know how the author came into this: did they hire her and tell her to write this particular story or did they hire her and ask her to write a story about Wonder Woman, leaving the actual choice up to her? Or did she send them a story outline that she wanted to do and they agreed? I don't have those answers, so all I can do is base this review on what I read - or in this case listen to, since this was an audiobook.

Audiobooks are very experimental for me. I listen to them while driving, so my attention is most often on the road, not the book, but I can still follow what's going on. Since I'm a captive audience several times a week, I get through quite a few of these and I also take more risks with what I select to listen to, and therefore run the risk of more failures in finding things which please me, but I also find many gems this way.

The novel was read by Mozhan Marnò who didn't do too bad of a job except that her pronunciation wandered at times. She pronounced Themyscira for example, as thought it were "Them is scarier" which, given Amazons, perhaps isn't too far adrift, but all it did was make me laugh every time she said it. Themyscira (Greek Θεμίσκυρα) was a real place and it's pronounced with a soft 'th' sound as in 'thought' not in 'this'. It should sound a bit like Theh-mees-keer-a, with equal stress on all syllables but maybe a touch more on the 'mees' part - as far as I know. This begs the question as to why they got a woman of Iranian descent to read this rather than one of Greek descent?

This book began with Diana, aka Wonder Woman to be, taking part in a foot race. Normally the princess doesn't do this, but in this case she wants to assert her growing womanhood and take what she believes to be her rightful place as an Amazon woman rather than a cosseted royal. unfortunately, a sinking schooner on the coastline distracts her, and she ends up diving in, pulling out a woman, and saving her life.

This is where the first confusion rose because one of her friends on Themyscira is an Irish woman, yet when she pulls this (almost-) drowning victim from the sea, she talks of her as human. Was the Irish Amazon not human? If she was Amazon and not human, then how is she Irish? This made no sense to me at all. I thought all Amazons were human, except Diana, who was fashioned from clay.

The problems with the writing began here because Diana is in fear now of being punished because of her transgression in saving this woman's life and bringing her onto the island, yet Bardugo forgets that Diana is a princess of royal blood. She has this fellow Amazon bullying her with absolute no blow-back, and she has Diana living in fear of failure and of being punished!

Diana did not read as royal at all, not remotely, let alone heroic! She was just another Bardugo schoolgirl character. This was when I realized that it was Bardugo, not Diana who was out of her depth here. She simply cannot write an engaging story, period, not even when it's handed to her on a plate like this.

The story did not improve, it got worse. Diana had a critical deadline to meet regarding this woman she had rescued, and yet she spent so much time lollygagging on the way until it became a last minute thing. In short, Bardugo made Diana look like a moron, not heroic at all, and I can't forgive her for that. She made Diana into a man with tits instead of telling the story of an amazingly powerful, yet restrained woman. There was no gentility or even femininity here. It was all brawn and power, not compassion and smarts, and the villain was telegraphed right from the start of the story such that even I could recognize them. I'm done with reading anything else by this authors, and I cannot recommend this story.


Sunday, February 4, 2018

Firefight by Brandon Sanderson


Rating: WARTY!

This is the second in The Reckoners series: Steelheart, Mitosis, Firefight and Calamity. Mitosis is a short pointless story available for free online. I read Steelheart and rated it as a worthy read even though I had issues with it. I'm not a series fan, and I picked this one up used, 'on spec' not knowing if I would like it or not, and in the end, I grew bored with it; with the tiresome first person voice, with the tedious bad metaphors which the author apparently thinks are hilarious, and with the total lack of anything happening for hugely-long periods. The novel takes so painfully long to get anywhere at all that it became tedious to read. I took time away from it to read a couple of library books and when I got back to it, I did not have the heart or the interest to read any more of it.

The story is removed from the abysmally named Newcago where Steelheart reigned, to New York City which is equally irritatingly renamed and where a different "epic" - which is what the super villains are called - reigns. She is known to the professor - an epic who avoids going bad by using his powers not for himself, but through others for good. So the author basically tells the same story over again, but switches everything around to pretend it;s really different, which is all an author can do in a series, isn't it? So, new location, but still a large North American city. This one instead of being covered in steel, is covered in water for no good reason other than that the author couldn't use metal again, right?! Instead of the villain being male, it's female. Oh wow, what a change up! Instead of it being personal for the main character, this time it's personal for the professor.

In short, there's literally nothing new here, and on top of that it was slow as molasses in mid-winter Alaska. I cannot recommend this and I am so tired fo series now that I feel like I never want to try even the first volume of another one.


Monday, January 29, 2018

Captain Canuck Vol 1 Aleph by various writers and artists


Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Captain Canuck evidently has a long history, but I was truly disappointed in this outing, which collects issues 1 through 6 and which was my introduction to this character. I should have realized from the cover image that it was going to be confused and unrealistic. Giant savage mutant polar bears are very much in the realm of fantasy and the disrespect for the polar bear itself was nauseating. As the name of the graphic novel suggests, this is essentially a rip-off of Captain America with sufficient changes made to avoid a lawsuit from meg-conglomerate Disney, and it was not a very good rip-off.

The artwork and coloring was fine enough, but the writing and the overall story was really and truly confusing. Worse, it was all violence and gore with no humor or humanity in sight. Even having read fifty percent of this before I gave up in disgust, I have absolutely no idea what this story was supposed to be about. Chapter one started out strongly with a man who evidently has no super powers but is augmented by technology, going in to rescue people from a burning oil facility. He encounters what appear to be zombies and as you know, anything like zombie is inevitably violent and irrational. This is a tedious trope.

if the man had no super powers, but merely uses technology, this immediately begs the question as to why there's only one of him! Why not train several people like this and make a team? That story would have had a much better dynamic than this one did, but that question (why only one of them) wasn't even asked much less answered.

This was clearly a comic designed for print and not for electronic distribution which begs the questions as to why the review copies are electronic. I'm about ready to quit reviewing comics unless I can get a print version or unless the comic is specifically aimed at the ebook market. Publishers and comic book creators simply have not got their heads around the ebook concept, and graphic novel publishers who ought to be all over it seem slower than other forms of publication for reasons which escape me.

Thus pages 11 & 12 are a double page, but there's no obvious indication of this, so I'd started reading straight down the page before I realized it went over two pages. The amusing thing was that it made just as little sense whether you read down each page individually or read right across both pages and then down, which involved a lot of swiping back and forth on a tablet reader.

The fact that some panels seem to run off the edge of the page is no guide because on page 12 there's one that runs off the edge and looks like it might go to a second page, but it doesn't! Logic? You're not welcome in this layout! Readability? Thou art banishéd! The same kind of thing happened on other pages. Clearly the designers were so focused on trying to make the individual pages look so 'edgy' and 'kewl' that they completely forgot that actual people have to read it and make sense of it. If they so obviously don't care about the whole reading experience, much less about the electronic version of it, why should I care about what happens in their comic? Really?

The story quickly became lost in itself, with Captain Canuck blundering around blindly trying to find the people he was supposed to be rescuing, little progress made towards any actual story-telling. Their only escape seemed to be down a toxic waste chute, which begged he question, what toxic waste? This was an oil refinery, They're so mercenary in such places that there is no waste. They use literally everything for something to reap every buck they can from the oil, and while oil and gasoline are toxic, it's not the kind of toxic that was suggested here. And any word on the environmental impact of such a fire? Nope. Who cares about the environment? And this is Captain Canada in effect? That was a bad miss.

Chapter two was worse. We got a confused flashback which brought the story to a screeching halt and contributed nothing to it except to add a meandering and unnecessary backstory. I detest flashbacks for that very reason. I plowed on gamely for another couple of chapters until I was halfway through this, but gave up because the story wasn't getting any better and it wasn't remotely entertaining. I cannot in good faith recommend this.


Saturday, January 27, 2018

Incidentals Powers, Lies, and Secrets by Joe Casey, Larry Stroman, Rob Stull, Snakebite Cortez


Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This continues the ongoing story of a meteorite storm, and the super powers some people evidently developed as a consequence. The titles are rather variable in appeal and quality because they're all done by different teams, and while some have been great, others have been lacking. In short the whole series has been a bit patchy and this one just squeaked under the wire into the safe zone, based on the fact that it was a decent story by Joe Casey that melded well with the others I've read.

In terms of the graphics, I was less thrilled, but it was hard to pin down exactly what the problem was. From the illustrations in the back, it looks like Larry Stroman's pencil work is up to par, but perhaps these demo illustrations aren't the same quality as the ones actually employed in the panels. I don't know. The images looked unfinished in many panels. Fortunately, graphics to me are not everything. I mostly fread books that are all text, os to me the story is most important. There has to be an engaging and coherent story, and while good graphics can't make up for a tale poorly told, less than stellar images can get by with a good story behind them.

In this one we meet a team which is dedicated to 'rescuing' the enhanced humans from the selfish clutches of those who would employ them for less than altruistic purposes, shall we say. For this they use an enhanced who has the same power which Jamie Chung's character, Clarice Fong aka Blink, has in Marvel TV's The Gifted. I would really like to see this series distance itself from The Gifted, but it continues to parallel it in terms of the powers which these enhanced people have.

That said, it makes for a worthy read for the most part and this particular issue, artwork notwithstanding, is a welcome addition to the series.


Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Marvel's Black Widow: Forever Red by Margaret Stohl


Rating: WARTY!

This was another audiobook fail that I found at the library. It was not what I hoped for at all. Black Widow is very much a comic book character, but she was really brought to life for my by Scarlett Johansson in the Marvel movies. She's going to have appeared in more of them than Samuel Jackson by the time she's done! The problem is that this novel isn't really about Black Widow. Instead, it's Ava Orlova (which you might find funny when you realize that reader Julia Whelan pronounces that last name as 'all over'!). It's about her and Alex Manor, not about Natasha. She appears, but pretty much as a minor character, so the book is rather a bait and switch deal and it's really not well written for someone who is supposed to be a best-selling author.

We're promised in the blurb that we're getting "the untold story of Black Widow for the very first time," but blurbs lie! In an introductory portion, Natalia Romanova goes to assassinate her mentor Ivan Somodorov, and ends up rescuing Ana. She unaccountably promises to be there for Ana, but then avoids her for a decade. Meanwhile Ana seems to have been doped with something right before she was rescued, so maybe she has super powers, maybe not.

Ana begins falling for Alex, who she meets by accident, but feels drawn to since she'd dreamed of him without knowing who he was. Inevitably Ana and Natalia come into contact again, but by this time I was so tired of this limp story that I quit listening, and I returned it to the library to make someone else suffer it instead of me! Mwahaha! Ivan Somodorov has nothing on me when to comes to torture!

So everything I loved about the movie Black Widow was missing from this book. The action scenes were perfunctory and unimaginative, and the story was pretty pathetic. I can't recommend it.


Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Mitosis by Brandon Sanderson


Rating: WORTHY!

This is a free (as opposed to fee!) short story published as a filler between this author's Steelheart, and book two in The Reckoners series, called Firefight. The story features David, aka Steelslayer, one of The Reckoners - the people who fight against the Epics, which are the super-non-heroes. The problem with gaining super-powers in this world is that once you use them, you go bad. No one knows why. The only way to use them and stay good is to gift them to others who can use them in your name.

In this story there is a brief introduction with David and another reckoner buying hotdogs, which is rather boring. I don't get this obsession with hotdogs, so it was meaningless to me. The author should have put it in a prolog so I would have known to ignore it! LOL! David and his friend are heading to the city gates where people are screened as they come into the city. The main reason is to catch people who simply want to start a life of crime in the clunkily-named Newcago, but also so The Reckoners can catch Epics and Epic sympathizers who might be trying to sneak in. Why the Epics wouldn't simply come over the walls goes unexplained.

Anyway, David is suspicious of this one guy who comes in, and he soon discovers this guy can split himself just like 'Multiple Man' in X-Men: The Last Stand, but like Michael Keaton's character in Multiplicity, the more he clones himself, the dumber he becomes. This made no sense. Why would the cloning affect only his brain? Why would it not make his body weaker too? Or his heart? Fortunately for this rating, this was addressed.

Once the guy has split into many clones, he starts yelling the same message from different parts of the city - that he will shoot some passer-by if David doesn't show up. We're told the clones have to rejoin in order for their independent memories of what they did to be re-united, but when David shoots the first of these, all the others immediately come running. How did they know?

It turned out that David's information on the Mitosis - the cloning guy - was partly misinformation and in the end it was due to that, that he was saved. Like I said, short story, but not bad! I consider it a worthy read - and it's free, so what do you have to lose?! I'm currently reading book 2. I'll report on it when I'm done.


Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Superb by David F Walker, Sheena C Howard, Ray Anthony Height, Alitha Martinez, Eric Battle


Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I didn't like the first one I read in this series. Normally that would be the end of it, but I read a second one without realizing until the end that it was part of the same series, and I liked it. I also liked this one, probably more than any of the previous ones. The artwork was really good, the characters realistic (as comic book super heroes go!), interesting, motivated, and believable, and the writing was very good. I noted a strong female influence not only in the writing, but also in the art, and this can make a big difference to the overall look and feel of a comic.

I really like the way so called minorities are front and center. Minorities are actually the majority of people on the planet, yet they're so poorly served in comics, TV and movies that it's criminal. It was nice to see that balance being redressed without going overboard. It was also nice to see a character with Down Syndrome (aka trisomy 21) included as a major player. The relationship between him (Jonah, aka "Cosmosis"!) and Kayla (aka Amina). and the awesome Abbie, was choice. It really made the story shine for me.

Each individual graphic novel in this set is a sort of origin story, but its not your usual origin tale; it's more of a development story, which to me is more interesting, especially this one. All of the graphic novels I've read so far run in parallel, but there is no repetition. Each story advances the whole, and the only tiresome bit was the last bit which is the same in each comic. Of course you can skip this once you've read it the first time, and it does mean you can start with any comic in the group without having to worry that you missed something because you didn't start with the 'right one'.

In this story Kayla, already aware of her powers and that she's not the only one with them, is trying to keep a low profile, especially since her parents work for the corporation which is trying to capture, intern, and experiment upon those with such powers. Jonah is less retiring. He breaks into the corporate facility to finds out what they're up to, and he barely escapes with his life. Kayla protects him and this is how the two of them team up with Abbie, who is Jonah's friend. Unfortunately, Kayla's desire to live a normal life is seriously compromised, and that's all I'm going to say!

On the negative side, I have to say that this shtick with the powers-that-be coming down hard on the mutants is really reaching saturation point. Marvel has repeatedly done it with X-Men, Inhumans, and Gifted, and it's been done in other graphic novels unrelated to the DC and Marvel stables, including one I reviewed negatively recently. Frankly, it's starting to be boring. It would be nice to see something different.

In terms of this comic, it's hard at this point, despite having read several of them, to see how the foresight corporation got so much power that it can openly act as a paramilitary force and hunt down these people. That felt a little bit much, but maybe it will be explained. Or maybe I missed it in that first volume I read because I was so disappointed in it!

That quibble aside though, I really liked this graphic novel and I recommend it as a worthy read.

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Faith and the Future Force by Jody Houser, Stephen Segovia, Barry Kitson, Ulises Arreola


Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Now this is the kind of super-hero story I can really get with. I was thrilled by the first one in this series, so I was equally thrilled to have a chance to review another one and see how Faith is doing. She's doing fine and I'm keeping the Faith!

Once again, it's written by Jody Houser, who continues to sprinkle promos for Doctor Who (how can you not love a writer like that?!) as well as toss in other Sci-fi references. As I write this I am patiently counting down the days to the Doctor Who Christmas special, and the change over from the current Doctor who was not my favorite, to a new one who will, for the first time, be female! Squee!

On an unrelated topic, is it just me, or is anyone else amused by the superficial similarity between areola (the ring of color around a nipple, and the name of the colorist? Of course his name apparently derives from the Spanish for horse tack (or a part of horse tack, anyway!) not from coloration, but still! I love words!

This is a time-travel story featuring a time-traveling robot which is intent upon destroying the fabric of time itself. Consequently, we have with Faith being sought by some strange woman who is costumed like a super hero, but who evidently needs Faith's help (and that of a charming assortment of her super friends) to stop this machine. In that regard, it borrows a bit from Pixar's The Incredibles

What I liked about this is that it conveniently side-steps one objection I often find to time-travel stories, especially Doctor Who, who always seems to arrive in media res, which is: why not go back earlier and fix the problem before it starts? In which case there would be no show, so the Doctor always tosses out some patent nonsense about crossing his own time stream which of course he does time after time, especially in New York City where it's supposed to be all but impossible to visit. Hah! How many times has he been there now?

This story solves that problem because the robot is eating time, so they can't go back earlier - it doesn't exist! Double-hah! Faith aka Zephyr, is recruited by Timewalker (not Time Lord!) Neela Sethi several times, each time unaware that she's already been recruited and failed! Why does this keep-on getting repeated? Read it and find out! I recommend this one as a fun, sweet, entertaining, Segovially and Kitsonorously drawn, and areolistically-colored(!) story which is a very worthy read! Keep 'em coming you guys and I'll keep reading 'em!


Black by Kwanza Osajyefo, Tim Smith 3, Jamal Igle


Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I did not like this graphic novel. It was basically a rehash of The X-Men, or The Inhumans, or The Gifted, or New Mutants, or whichever simplistic, derivative Marvel Comic series about mutants you wish to name. This novel brought literally nothing new to the genre unless you count that in this case, the only people with the mutation are black! To me, it was racist.

All the "good guys" were black. All the "bad guys" were white. Neither side was anything more than a caricature. It felt like I was watching a so-called 'blaxploitation' movie from the early seventies. Since this was a graphic novel, and given that a potentially interesting premise failed to be effectively exploited, I found it hilarious that the color scheme was gray-scale! It felt ironically appropriate, but not in the way the creators intended, I'm sure.

While on the one hand I can understand this - and work like it - constitutes a backlash against the inexcusable racism inherent in comic books, movies, and TV shows where - unless you're prepared to be the token person of color - please don't show for the audition, the way to fix a problem where the pendulum has swing way-the-hell too far in one direction is not to swing it equally far to the opposite side, it's to stop it dead in the middle and weld that sucker down so it can never move again. Period.

I think the comic would have carried a much more powerful message had it been less comprehensively biased. As it is, it runs a dire risk of being viewed by too many people - and those are the very ones who most need to get an education - as being nothing more than sour grapes. It didn't help the cause that one of the freedom fighter leaders was named Caesar, the same name given to the chimpanzee in the Planet of the Apes saga. That sounded insulting to me.

Even that aside, it was not well-thought out. Rather than go with Marvel's asinine "x-gene" ploy, the creators (and I admire them for this) tried something different. Unfortunately, it wasn't something new! They made the mistake of taking the easy way out by simply making the quantum leap. It didn't work. The idea here is that some people (all black!) have unusual arrangements of quarks in their body. Quarks are the foundations of hadrons, which most people unknowingly know as protons and neutrons, and which form the nucleus of every atom.

There are six known quarks, divided into three up-types, named (with characteristic physicist quirkiness) up, charm, and top, and three down-types, named down, strange, and bottom. We're told that gifted black people (who may not necessarily be young!) have a hexaquark, like this is something rare, but it really isn't. Their expert is very confused and talks bayrons rather than baryons. But that, with its unintended allusion to Bay Watch, works given how some of the women are portrayed in this story. Which is another problem.

There's precisely one female super hero, and one transgendered one. The only other females are background or ancillary personnel. There is one professional assistant, one cop, and one lab technician. Two of these unaccountably wear eyeglasses whereas not one other person in the entire book does, and one of them - the so-called quantum particle expert - wears a lab coat. Barf.

The comic is hypocritical in this regard. On the one hand it's admirably, if ineffectively in my opinion, championing black characters in graphic novels, but on the other hand it's keeping "bitches" down. That's inexcusable, especially given that the women's liberation and black civil rights movements have historically often worked hand-in hand, because both sectors of society have been oppressed and in disturbingly similar way in some regards (such as having no vote, for example).

Why are there so few important black characters in graphic novels? Because most of those novels have traditionally been written by white folks and it never occurs to them to include non-whites. It's not that they hate black folks and what to keep them down or actively exclude them; it's just that (and this is no excuse) they just don't think of it. Why are there so few women of note in graphic novels? Because most of them are written by men - who don't hate women and don't wish to keep them down; it simply never occurs to them to include women. They just don't think of it. That's what happened here.

The main character is named Kareem Jenkins. He's shot for two reasons. The first of these is that it's a case of mistaken identity because all black folks evidently look alike to New Jack City cops, as a sorry history of shooting deaths in New York has shown and continues to show. The second is that when he's told to freeze, by armed cops, he's too stupid to do exactly that. Instead, he rabbits and is shot and ostensibly killed. A dozen or more black men have been fatally shot by NYPD in the last twenty-five years, and very few cases have even gone to trial, let alone ended in a conviction, but this novel repeatedly refers to NYPD as New York's finest. I don't know if that's meant to be ironic.

Kareem is unique because he rises again, and then is kidnapped by a character who far from being Straight Outta Compton, is straight outta The Matrix movie. He's Morpheus by another name, and he even sits with legs crossed in an armchair when we meet him, and effectively invites the kid to take the black pill. Yawn.

This leads to him discovering a hitherto totally unknown world of back mutants, all of whom have powers of some sort, but there are then so many of these characters so quickly introduced that they become lost and meaningless in the crowd. The irony of course is that here, all black people do look the same, not because they're all drawn the same (the artwork was pretty decent), but for no other reason than that this comic book has failed to differentiate them by giving them distinctive personalities and back-stories.

Having some of them speak in what in some circles, and for better or for worse, has been dubbed 'ebonics' is not giving them a personality. It's not giving them character. It's not making them individual. It's just cynically pigeon-holing them. There should have been fewer of them initially, and they should have been properly introduced instead of being treated like so many nameless, interchangeable slaves. This was a serious fail.

The plot doesn't work because we're expected to believe that a handful of white folks have pulled the wool over people's eyes for literally centuries, working in concert with the black community! I'm sure this isn't what the creators intended to convey, but it's very effectively what they achieved, because as the white community has, we're told, systematically sought to wipe out this 'black threat', the black community has been trying to hide the mutants, and neither side has ever let anything get out to the public! It's simply not credible.

Even if we allow that it worked before, it sure as hell would not work now! Have the creators of this series not seen the black community? Everyone is a showman or woman. There are pop divas and DJs with monumental egos. There are sports personalities with attitude, there are movie stars all about showmanship and conspicuous consumption, and there are so-called 'reality' shows and talk shows which are all about self-promotion.

None of this is confined to the black community, but we're not talking about how white folk might behave here. There is no way in hell, if any of this community had these powers, that they would all consistently keep them secret! It's simply not credible and this unarguable fact brought the whole story down and gave the lie to this farcical 'secrecy' claim. Besides, it made no sense to begin with - not in this day and age. If the white folks are trying to wipe-out the gifted peeps, then the best way to stop it is to go public, not go private. "Morpheus" is a moron!

Neither is it credible that the white folks would be able to continue their pogrom of extermination into modern times when much of the world is now ruled by non-white leaders. Are we supposed to believe that black leaders in African nations were in on it with the white folks? Bullsh! (More on that shortly). This is a classic case of failure to think outside the box, the box being the United Whites of America. Far too many of these kind of dystopian or secret society stories are far too hide-bound by 'American' thinking, or constrained by 'The American Way'.

What far too many authors fail to grasp is that there's an entire planet outside the USA that doesn't think about the USA from one week to the next because they have more important things to think about! They do not conform to US norms or patterns of thinking! They do not live the way US citizens live! They do no view the world like US people view it. Any story like this, which has global implications, yet which tries to pretend the entire globe is just like the USA is doomed to failure, and this one fell right into that trap.

There was almost cussing in this story! It's not credible. Almost all the time, when a cuss was about to be issued here, it was cut off. Instead of "Fuck!" we got "Fu-". Instead of "Shit" we got "Sh-" hence my "Bullsh" comment above. It's not realistic. It maybe be practical for some readerships, but people don't talk that way in real life, and everyone, even kids and churchgoers, knows it. You either have to include it to make it real, or you have to skip it for the sake of the readership. You can't have it both ways without it sounding truly dumb, and suspending suspension of disbelief. In short, either sh or get of the po.... Yeah! That's dumb it sounds.

A brief lesson in genetics: Not all mixed race couples have exclusively black children. Even a black couple can legitimately have a white child. Nature is color-blind! The reason for all this is that there is no difference, at the genetic level, between black people and white people and Asian people and whatever people.

Just like in real life there is no X gene, there is no B-for-black-gene either. There are gene networks wherein many genes acting in concert can achieve remarkable ends, but there is no 'negro network' than can make a person black or pigeon-hole one as such and more than there is a 'honky network' that can make a person white. This begs my last question: why did this affect only black people? There was no rationale given for this. We were expected to take it on trust.

Maybe the authors had some plan to work this out later, but forgive me for having little appetite for swallowing that when I'd already been asked to swallow much that was unpalatable in this graphic novel. I got the impression that they were winging it; tossing in some quantum nonsense and hoping to get by, but as we've seen, there is nothing in our genes to confer powers on one race and not another, so how much less credibility is there in ascribing this same effect to something even more fundamental: sub-atomic particles?

Quarks do have a property referred to as 'color', but it has nothing whatsoever to do with actual color as we perceive color day-to-day at the macro level. It's just a word; not a meaningless word because it has meaning to physicists, but it doesn't convey the same thing to them when they talk about quarks as it does to the rest of us when we talk about LED TVs. There is quite literally no color at the sub-atomic level as any electronic microscope image you can find online will show. Some of them have artificial-color added for clarification purposes, just as those glorious space images do, but in reality the sub-atomic world, just like the outer space world, is a very colorless one indeed.

Oddball congregations of quarks, which are the components of all matter, living or not, cannot grant powers to one race without granting them to all. It's another case of failure to think through. I mean, do Asians have powers? They're not white, but they ain't black either! How about the Latinx community? Deal or no deal?! What bothers me about this is that the authors seem to be saying that black people are somehow fundamentally different from all others, which is patently not true, but by saying it, they're risking undoing what decent, good-faith people of all races have been trying to accomplish for decades: true color-blindness wherein all are equal, all are one family, and all are brothers and sisters. The plot for this novel seemed like a very negative step to me unless it was handled better than it was here.

Black folks do have something rare and it is a real superpower: they have greater genetic diversity, especially those resident in Africa, than do any other humans. The reason for this is that all humans started life in Africa, not in Eden. We're all black. Unfortunately, the pale skin minority has forgotten this, and instead of seeing it as something unifying and something to be proud of, too many people see one color or another as a fault or a defect, something to be despised and rejected. Americans are often proud of their Irish, or German, or English, or native American, or whatever ancestry. What a pity they arbitrarily stop it at some point before it ever gets all the way back to eastern Africa where it all began.

So in conclusion, I cannot recommend this story as a worthy read. There were too many problems with it including endless excessive violence, but at least it was gray-scale so there was very little red ink to deal with. The one positive sign I saw was that in the end, Kareem took off on his own, rejecting all the bullsh- he;d witnessed. I commend him for that, but for me, it was too little, too late.


Friday, December 15, 2017

Accell by Joe Casey, Damion Scott, Robert Campanella, Sigmund Torre


Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I had no idea this comic was connected with Noble Vol 1 by Brandon Thomas, Roger Robinson et al. It's just as well, because if I had, I would not have requested it! As it happens I did request it, and ended up enjoying this one whereas I did not like the first one at all. While I still assert that the plot twist at the end is too far-fetched to be realistic, the story leading up to that was actually really good.

In this case, this was not one of the astronauts who was affected, but a guy down on Earth who saw the meteor shower and found a meteorite near his home - just a tiny piece. He slept with it under his bed and suddenly, he can move like the Flash. Unlike the Flash, he actually pays a price for his super-speed, which means hunger. He has to eat a lot.

Sometimes he pays more than that. If he gets injured while running - or fighting crime - he really gets injured, but it doesn't stop him until he stops himself, and at that point he'd better have stopped in an ER. But he heals really fast. He's a 'person of color' as they say, so this was also appreciated - there are too few and far between of those in comics, TV, movies, you name it. His Name is Danny Santos; I'll leave you to figure his ethnicity!

So he fights crime and he has a girlfriend who at first does not know of his power, but during the story he reveals it to her. I felt bad for her because of two things: first, her father hates that she's seeing this guy, and he's willing to do quite literally anything to break them up; second: Danny is a jerk towards her to begin with, but even that changed as he grew to appreciate her and realize he actually had a responsibility to her.

Overall this ws an entertaining and well-written comic, with great artwork (although the main character was a little bit too stick figure-y for my taste!). That aside and with the caveat about the improbable ending, I recommend this as a worthy read.