Mystique Ultimate Collection by Brian K Vaughan, Jorge Lucas, Michael Ryan, Manuel Garcia

Rating: WORTHY!

Originally created by artist David Cockrum, Mystique's "real" name is Raven Darkhölme, although she has many aliases, and no one really knows squat about her actual name, or her origins or how old she is - it would seem she's at least a century which begs the question as to why she would be interested in anyone of her own apparent age unless she simply wanted to get laid by a young stud. Like Logan, otherwise known as Wolverine, her youth is preserved by her mutation. In Logan's case it's his healing ability. In Mystique's case it's through her shape-shifting, so she sure doesn't look like she's a centenarian.

Being contrary, she rejects the use of the name 'Raven' in this volume, and is going about her routine business of assassinating people who harm mutants, when she finds herself about to be terminated. At the last minute (because rescuers never can be punctual), she's rescued by Magneto, which is a surprise to her because she thought he was dead; however, it's not Magneto, it's Charles Xavier. He's merely projecting Magneto into her brain in order to win her trust and effect the rescue. Well, he fails!

The deal is that he wants jobs done which he doesn't want tied back to him or his mutants, and Mystique represents the perfect undercover agent to carry out his wishes. If she were not wanted by every nation on the planet (except one!), she would have rejected his deal out of hand, but having a lifelong interest in self-preservation, she decides to throw her lot in with him at least for the time being especially since his wishes happen to coincide with her aims for once.

She begins carrying out ops for him which are rooted in the assassination of Prudence, an X-men undercover operative. Prudence was on the trail of a viral agent which has the power to kill everyone who has been inoculated against smallpox, which includes the entire US military, along with medical professionals and a host of other people. Smallpox is a horrible disease, and this mutant version is a huge threat. Mystique takes up the baton and flies with it. She's cool, exciting, inventive, resourceful and every bit the embodiment of a strong female character that I like. Plus she can literally kick ass. Her foes are a match for her (almost!) and the plots are pretty decent. I really enjoyed these stories.

This graphic novel had some truly breath-taking art between chapters done by Mike Mayhew, and though it was superlative, it wasn't so different from the regular panel art that it made me feel cheated as some comics do. Overall this novel was very well illustrated by Jorge Lucas, Michael Ryan, and Manuel Garcia. That George Lucas sure gets around doesn't he? LOL! I've been watching a show on Netflix titled Life which is about this cop who returns to the job after twelve years of false imprisonment for a triple-murder he didn't commit, and the name of the producer is Loucas George! You can't get away from the guy!

One thing I liked about the art is that it seemed a little less "sexploitive" than comic book art all-too-often is where a female character - super or otherwise - is concerned, so I appreciated that. That and the overall quality of the art and of course the excellent stories were what made this a worthy read.

Paper Girls Vol 1 Brian K Vaughan, Cliff Chiang, Matt Wilson

Rating: WORTHY!

Well this was a fun romp and definitely something I'd like to continue reading. It proves you can write a story with the word 'paper' in the title and not make a complete johngreen of yourself. I can't say much about the art because this was an advance review copy and it looked like the artwork had been 'de-rezzed' to make the file size smaller. This made for quick page turning, but it was hard to see exactly how the final art will look. In very general terms, it looked fine, though. It was reminiscent of older comics, not in the fact that it was pointillist (it wasn't, thankfully!), but in the general style, and this was fine because this was set in the late eighties, and there are a lot of eighties references, be warned.

It has four intriguing, amusing, and interesting female teens all of whom deliver newspapers in the neighborhood. Three of them hang out together and the fourth joins them and gets to know them over the course of the early morning delivery, but there's a heck of a lot more going on here than delivering papers.

It's the morning after Halloween, so there are some costumed people still around (although why they would still be around at that hour of the morning is a bit of a mystery). The girls have a run-in with some of them - in fact that's how they all meet - and then they split-up to finish their rounds quickly. This is when trouble starts as one pair contacts the other pair over a walkie-talkie (no cell phones back then, remember!), and when they meet up, it turns out some weird dudes in ninja costumes have stolen their other walkie-talkie.

The feistiest of the girls, Mackenzie, aka Mac, vows to take it back. Tiffany and KJ are on-board immediately, and the new girl, Erin, follows along. They end up in a basement where there is a machine which Mac erroneously compares with an Apollo space capsule. It's actually more like a Mercury capsule, but she doesn't know enough to know that. Some sort of power or force comes out of the capsule and the girls immediately beat a retreat.

Here's where it goes to hell. Now there are pterosaurs flying around, which I note some reviewers misidentified as dinosaurs. They're not. They were no more dinosaurs than the aquatic reptiles from that era were dinosaurs). The thing is that these pterosaurs were carrying armored "pilots" who seemed to be zapping everyone they found with sticks reminiscent of the weapons from the Stargate movie. With so many disappearing, people think it's the rapture! The new guys in the armor seem to be at war with the ninja dudes and the girls are, in the words of Stealers Wheel, "Stuck in the middle with news." (That might not be what they sang!).

And that's all the spoilers you're going to get! Yeah, I know, I'm a mean old cuss, but I loved this story! There's feistiness, weirdness, time-travel, maybe parallel worlds, and it all starts with some girls delivering newspapers. I love that it's so different and, within context, believable. These girls don't do out of character stuff, and they don't act completely at random. They're totally believable in everything they do and say, and the story flows so naturally. My only complaint about this story is that, in the words of Queen, "I want it all and I want it now!" When's the next volume due out?! Sadly Queen doesn't get a mention in this graphic novel - and neither do any other bands, which is a bit odd, but no worries! I hold out hopes for some musical references in later volumes, and in the meantime, I recommend this as a worthy read!

Y The Last Man Unmanned by Brian K Vaughan

Title: Y The Last Man Unmanned
Author: Brian K Vaughan
Publisher: Warner Bros
Rating: WORTHY!

Penciler: Pia Guerra
Penciler: Goran Sudžuka
Inker: José Marzán Jr
Colorist: Zylonol Studios

This was an unexpected treasure! I went to the half price bookstore to see if I could find Wayward Pines by Blake Crouch (Barty's other son, no doubt). Failing to get that, I checked out the graphic novel section and found every single one of the books I recently checked out of the library - and only those! Weird. There was however, one more tucked away deeper back on the shelf and when I tugged it out, it turned out to be the very first issue in this series! How fortuitous was that? So here, completely out of order (which is my middle name), is how it all began.

It's the amulet! Yorick's un-proposed-to fiancée seems to be having cold feet (she fell in love with a kangaroo) and Yorick is covered in Monkey sheet monkey doo-doo. Meanwhile, 355 shows up - with the amulet! The Republican desperate housewives try to run the government out of town, and Yorick's sister Hero puts in an all-too-brief appearance.

So 355 rescues Yorick from the psycho Amazons and just about everyone learns that he's, why, the last man of course! But 355 has a plan. Glad that someone does. She takes Yorick to Dr Allison Mann who is utterly astounded - to discover that a male Capuchin survived.

So this was a bit choppy for my taste - running between one group pf people and another, and then have flashbacks and flash forwards, so it was very uneven and a bit hard to follow at times. However, it was a great start and I recommend it.

Y The Last Man Girl On Girl by Brian K Vaughan

Title: Y The Last Man Girl on Girl
Author: Brian K Vaughan
Publisher: Warner Bros
Rating: WORTHY!

Penciler: Pia Guerra
Penciler: Goran Sudžuka
Inker: José Marzán Jr
Colorist: Zylonol Studios

This is one of my favorite volumes. Agent 355, Dr Mann, and Yorick are on a boat heading for Japan. The problem is that Yorick is in a crate in the boat's cargo hold. He's an escape artist so he's supposed to be able to escape, but the escape was predicated on the crate being stowed the right way up with nothing on top, so Yorick is trapped. When the crate is broken, the ship's crew discovers that there is a man left alive on Earth.

The crew seems friendly, but in end are revealed to be drug runners. The Royal Australian Navy is in hot pursuit in a rickety old submarine. One of its crew, Aussie Rose Copen, is already aboard the boat, with her distinctive eye-patch, spying on the drug runners. She relays information about their location to the sub. Meanwhile, Dr Mann and 355 get it on - or at least they try to before they're rudely interrupted by Yorick.

Rose ends up in the brig and slowly, Yorick and 355 change their minds about her - and about the crew, but the captain, Kilina, sweet talks Yorick and makes herself sound less of a villain than a woman acting out of desperation. They almost get it on, but are interrupted by the arrival of the sub.

There's a brief exchange of weapons fire, but the sub wins, sinking the boat. Captain Kilina evidently went down with her ship, but most of the crew were saved. Rose asks to come with 355, Mann, and Yorick. She seems to have far more of an interest in Mann than she does in man.

Here's a writing issue from this story. The sub's captain at one point says, "That's because less accidents happen...". This is grammatically incorrect. It should be "fewer accidents", but this is someone's speech and no one speaks with perfect grammar unless they're insufferably pretentious, so in this case, bad grammar is good writing!

I recommend this volume. The writing is excellent, the plotting wonderful, and the art work great. One thing I really liked about this one was that I finally got to meet Beth, Yorick's fiancée, who turns out to be an interesting character in her own right. I don't know why the focus has been so much on Yorick and so little on her. Yes, I get that it's about the last man, not the last man's fiancée, but still, I think she's been done a disservice. I hope I'll see more of her as I read more volumes.

One thing which has bothered about this series (apart from my not being able to read it in order from start to finish!) is that not only are there pretty much only women left alive, but very nearly every one of those women is drawn in male fantasy mode: young, curvaceous, long-haired and lax morals. Why is that? I think it's because this novel was written by a guy, and he has no interest in depicting women who do not figure in his fantasies. That's something that's just not right and is the one real blemish on this entire series, for me.

Y The Last Man Kimono Dragons by Brian K Vaughan

Title: Y The Last Man Kimono Dragons
Author: Brian K Vaughan
Publisher: Warner Bros
Rating: WORTHY!

Penciler: Pia Guerra
Penciler: Goran Sudžuka
Inker: José Marzán Jr
Colorist: Zylonol Studios

I love the titles of some of these volumes. Kimono Dragons! Perfect! We start out here with Yorick, alas, looking like a reject from a remake of A Clockwork Orange. They're finally in Japan, and he and 355 are trying to track down Yorick's pet monkey (that's not a sexual as it might sound to some). Dr Mann is trying to track down her mom, but someone burned down her mom's lab - not her dog, her laboratory. Mann is with Rose and Rose is definitely with Mann.

The Yakuza is now being run by a Canadian cross between Madonna and Miley Cyrus, and it is she who has this Capuchin monkey, famous for its coffee. Or maybe not. The question is, will You who is now a purveyor of android pleasures by way of being a wakaresaseya and before that a member of the Ginza-Yonchome Koban police, actually help them retrieve & (figure it out) from the Takuza, or will she betray them?

355 has a bit of a breakdown after she realized that in order to further the mission, she was getting ready to blow the head off a young girl. Unfortunately, she hesitated and was lost. Meanwhile, both Rose and Dr Mann feel stabbing pains - and from the same Ninja katana, too.

Can the Israeli army drive their tanks to their destination in time and if so, where are they going, and what the hell are they going to do with them when they get there? Capture the twins? It takes two to tank-le! And is Dr Mann going to bleed her secret - all over the floor, as Rose once again lies - on a bed, injured? Still loving this series!

Y The Last Man Motherland by Brian K Vaughan

Title: Y The Last Man Motherland
Author: Brian K Vaughan
Publisher: Warner Bros
Rating: WORTHY!

Penciler: Pia Guerra
Penciler: Goran Sudžuka
Inker: José Marzán Jr
Colorist: Zylonol Studios

The motherland volume proceeds very much in the same mode as the earlier ones, but the characters change somewhat and the locations too, and new things are coming to light all the time - including some dark and dirty secrets, so my interest was very much maintained here.

The one-eyed Australian spy turns around and resigns from her commission out of love for the part-Chinese character, although agent 355 doesn't trust her, especially when she gets sick and starts bleeding. But then agent 355 doesn't trust anyone, and makes short work of a ninja girl who is rather full of herself.

We get to meet the Israeli navy, such as it is - or rather, I guess, a rogue portion of it. The commander of the boat claims she stole a battleship, but the boat looks more like a cruiser or a patrol boat than ever it does a battleship.

The art work is simple but very functional and very well done. Even the animals get a fair shake, as attention focuses in this issue upon Yorick's pet Capuchin monkey, which the group is trying to get mated to a suitable female without much success. Since I was reading these out of sequence I wasn't sure what the point of this was. Yorick was certainly deeply interested in the monkey's welfare, however! Another volume that's a worthy read.

Y The Last Man Paper Dolls by Brian K Vaughan

Title: Y The Last Man Paper Dolls
Author: Brian K Vaughan
Publisher: Warner Bros
Rating: WORTHY!

Penciler: Pia Guerra
Penciler: Goran Sudžuka
Inker: José Marzán Jr
Colorist: Zylonol Studios

Paper Dolls is another in a rather random sampling I made of this series perforce, since the library didn't have the whole set! Having read a few volumes, though, I do want to read the whole set now. It was in Paper Dolls where I first met the crew of the submarine which has abducted poor Yorick, alas, and is transporting him around the world. We get to know Yorick's pet monkey and stage assistant, named & (figure it out!). The monkey is the key to what's going on here. We also get an origin story for the secretive but highly-effective Agent 355. Yorick continues his forlorn quest to find out whence his fiancée Beth has disappeared (Hint: she;'s somewhere in Australia, supposedly.

This is where his naked picture is published in a tabloid newspaper, supposedly proving that there's at least one guy still alive on Earth - although who will believe it? It also introduces us to the pregnant one and to a weird-ass religious order (one of several we'll meet in this series.

The writer's and artists' willingness to show a full-frontal nude male is refreshing. Usually in these kinds of comics, they show the female in all her glory while hiding the naughty bits of the male. In this series, they seem quite unwilling to show females, yet unabashedly show Yorick's particulars. Go figure.

I liked this comic because it keeps unveiling the story. It's like one of those giant theater curtains which keeps on drawing back, and drawing back, and you start to wonder if and when it will ever stop! I recommend this one.

Y The Last Man Ring Of Truth by Brian K Vaughan

Title: Y The Last Man Ring Of Truth
Author: Brian K Vaughan
Publisher: Warner Bros
Rating: WORTHY!

Penciler: Pia Guerra
Penciler: Goran Sudžuka
Inker: José Marzán Jr
Colorist: Zylonol Studios

This is a series I stumbled onto at the local library (yeay libraries!) which unfortunately did not have issue one to hand, so having perused a volume and decided I liked it, I decided to take the plunge with the series "in progress" as it were, and I wasn't disappointed in the first volume I read, which was Paper Dolls. Yeah, it sounds like a novel by John Green, but this novel makes John green with envy, and having read it, I think I can say that you don't absolutely need to have read previous volumes to enjoy it, but it helps for background! Having read this one I did want to start the series over, it was that good and that engrossing.

For a series written by a guy about the one lone remaining guy in the world after a plague wipes out all (or as we later discover, very nearly all) human males, it's not what you might think. While the context is adult in nature, it's not x-rated by any means, although there are adult situations and some violence, which is relatively mild by comic book standards. The published graphic novels in the series are these:

• Unmanned
• Cycles
• One Small Step
• Safeword
• Ring of Truth
• Girl on Girl
• Paper Dolls
• Kimono Dragons
• Motherland
• Whys and Wherefores

I started from volume five and read through volume ten.

Why it took a guy to write this I don't know. Why some female graphic novel artist/ author (and there are a lot of you, I know, despite popular perceptions!) couldn't man up is a good question. Yes, I'm kidding with the man up comment, but I'm very serious about why a guy wrote this. Is there a female writer who wants to write the one about the only female left on the planet? It needs to be done! I'd be happy to write it with you if you're interested.

So Yorick, alas, is one of the insignificant, yet highly significant few men remaining alive, and all he wants to do is get back to his fiancé, Beth, who is somewhere e=doing walkabout in Australia. Unfortunately, when he finally talks the crew of the submarine in which he's traveling almost like a prisoner, into letting his look for her, it turns out, so he learns, that she's gone to Paris to find him!

Here's a writing issue that I see frequently in books and movies, and on TV, and which also appears here: "My name is Sister Lucia Ober..." (p88) - no, that's her title and her name! Unless she was actually named "Sister" by her parents, then her name is Lucia Ober, her title is "Sister". OK, pet peeve off.

Sister Lucia is delusional, and I'm not talking about her belief in a god, although that's one problem. She thinks that the Catholic Church pulled people out of the dark ages when it actually dragged people down into the dark ages - and is still trying to hold them there today!

There's unintentional humor, too. A tone point one character says, "There's a reason the best rock climber sin he world are all women" - well in a world where there's only one or two men left, I imagine the best rock climbers are all women!

I found it odd, and not a little affected that the speeches for people in the flashbacks were all in parenthesis. It was annoying, but not a killer, and the rest of the novel was great: nice writing, good humor, cool action, lots of interesting characters, and really good art work, so I recommend this volume.

Ex Machina Volume 3 by Brian K. Vaughan

Title: Ex Machina Volume 3
Author: Brian K. Vaughan
Publisher: DC Comics
Rating: WARTY!

Pencils and covers by Tony Harris
Inks by Tom Feister
Colors by JD Mettler.

Well, I had a good run with Ex Machina - two whole volumes I enjoyed, but the third, well, the third fell flat for me and I just didn't feel like reading any more after that. Time to move on to something more engaging. The art work was fine, but I don't read the comics for the art work - that's like frosting on the cake for me, but the cake's the thing, otherwise it's just meaningless - if pretty - pictures. I read them for a good story, and if that isn't there, then there really isn't much left.

This series started out great, but volume three was like entering a different universe. It wasn't as witty, as engaging, as devil-may-care, as irreverent or as funny as the previous two volumes. I don't know what went wrong. it's like the writer lost track of what he was doing or where he was going. The artifact, which had figured large in the previous volumes was essentially irrelevant here. Why?

In addition to that, the previous outing was a mad rush through assassination attempts and all kinds of other entertaining issues, and now this is like Mitchell finally made it to some cover and feels so scared to venture out that the spends the entire volume cowering down and staring blankly at the wallpaper!

The best plot idea that can be scared-up for this volume was that Mitchell has to do jury duty. Hello, he's the mayor! And you know it's bad when the only other thing going on is flashbacks to parent issues. It was truly sad, and I can't bring myself to read any more of this series at this point.

.

Ex Machina Volume 2 by Brian K. Vaughan

Title: Ex Machina Volume 2 Tag
Author: Brian K. Vaughan
Publisher: DC Comics
Rating: WORTHY!

Pencils and covers by Tony Harris
Inks by Tom Feister
Colors by JD Mettler.

Volume two of this entertaining and colorful (in many different ways!) graphic novel starts out with a distractingly dead disemboweled dog deep in the dark domain of the subway. Soon denizens of the city begin disporting themselves dressed-out in the same demented demeanor. In addition to this, the weird glyph that's tied to the source of The Great Machine's power starts appearing as graffiti in the subway, turns into anime, and infects a traveler on the subway, causing her to stick a pen in her eye, Orphan Black style!

The featured governmental problem in this edition is Hundred's desire to marry off his close advisor's gay brother which will be a bold challenge to state statute. That goes off, of course, with a hitch - duhh! - but not before we get all kinds of grief about it from all kinds of people including one guy who sneaks a bow and a quiver of arrows into the crowd and attempts to shoot Hundred. He has a freaking bow - why would he not simply get up onto a building roof and shoot from there? This makes no sense! It makes even less sense how he ever got in there! We're told the bow is folding, Hawkeye-style, but the quiver full of arrows sure as hell isn't.

The villain here was a little bit predictable - it's a trope in fiction that when they don't find the body, the 'victim' is still alive. Were it that way in real life, but it's not - it happens pretty much only in fiction. Other than that the story was amusing and inventive, and quite engrossing.

The art work has always been rather simple in this series, which is fine because it does its job, but I have to say there are inconsistencies in character depiction. For example, on around page twenty (the pages are not numbered), Hundred's assistant, named Journal, is depicted as a voluptuous woman reminiscent of Lily Corazon Kwamboka or Josie Goldberg, whereas just 14 or so pages later, she's as willowy as she originally was. I have no idea what's going on there any more than I did with the curiously variable cup size of the reporter, Suzanne's bosom..

Overall, it was a worthy read, once again full of life, humor and the pursuit of weirdos, and I recommend it.

Ex Machina Volume 1 by Brian K Vaughan

Title: Ex Machina Volume 1 The First Hundred Days
Author: Brian K Vaughan
Publisher: DC Comics
Rating: WORTHY!

Pencils and covers by Tony Harris
Inks by Tom Feister
Colors by JD Mettler.

This began as a pretty cool comic but by volume three it had become rather tedious. I can recommend volumes one and two, however, which are funny, original, and entertaining. I doubt I will continue it now though, especially since it runs to some fifty issues! Be warned that this novel has adult situations and language. It's not for young kids or for people who are easily offended.

The premise here is that Mitchell Hundred, a New York City engineer, was somehow changed or infected, or whatever, by an artifact found in the river. He adopted a persona known as The Great Machine, after something Thomas Jefferson said (either that or it's right out of Babylon 5) about the great machine of government or of society depending on which of his quotes you refer to. The dick-head was obsessed with great machines in an era where great machines were virtually non-existent - go figure!.

After saving a handful of lives as the World Trade Center collapsed on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Hundred ran for mayor and won. Not a single cop or fire-fighter was elected to mayor. Only plushly-padded businessmen and super heroes. Being merely heroic just isn't enough, I guess. So the title of this graphic novel is therefore a play both on his name and his first one hundred days in office which is somehow deemed by the popular press to be significant.

As a result of his enhancement or however you like to refer to it, Hundred can communicate with machines. No one knows or explains how this is supposed to work, but by issuing spoken commands (in a weird green font, yet), he can tell a machine to turn on or off, he can make hidden listening devices generate white noise, and he can tell a gun to jam, and so on. This, together with his rocket pack is what makes him the world's first and only super hero. This 'rocket man' idea is pretty much purloined from the Rocketeer comic book of 1982, which itself stole heavily from older sci-fi movies such as 1954's King Of The Rocket Men.

The comic, which also has a slight tinge of steam punk to it, but is mostly rooted in fifties sci-fi, is rife with flashbacks, most of which are actually interesting until we reach volume three, but the most entertaining parts are the contemporary scenes where Hundred tries to get the work of government done while all the time having to deal with ghosts from his past and attempts on his life, as well as with a coterie of fascinating support characters (which includes some sassy women), all of whom seem to be as combative as they are supportive.

In volume one, his major problems are a person who seems to be dedicatedly assassinating snow-plow drivers, and a work of art (so-called) which consists of a large portrait of Abraham Lincoln with the word 'nigger' painted across it which is causing problems because it's being exhibited in a show in a publicly-funded museum - but mostly because people take art way-the-hell too seriously.

I recommend this comic for its wacky humor, and its interesting situations and and events. If TV sit-coms were this well done I'd actually watch them! One of the best parts about this for those interested in how comic books are put together, is the section in back which demonstrates just this in this case, using real people to pose for the scenes, and then translating those real life scenes into finished art-work, thereby getting positioning and perspective just right. I recommend this volume.