Dave's Capsules for November 2024

Archive of older reviews

Items of Note (Strongly Recommended or otherwise worthy): Nothing this month.

In this installment: Agatha All Along, Deadpool & Wolverine, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur "The Gatekeeper" withdrawn episode, Cat + Gamer vol 6, Cthulhu Cat, Heterogenia Linguistico vol 2, After God vol 1, Asadora! vol 8, Primer: Clashing Colors, Star Trek Lower Decks Warp Your Own Way, The Little Trashmaid vol 2, Fantastic Four #26, Venom War: Fantastic Four, Moon Knight Fist of Khonshu #1, Ultraman x Avengers #2 (of 4), My Adventures With Superman #5-6 (of 6), Gatchaman Galactor #2-3 (of 4), Gatchaman #4, Vampirella #672, My Little Pony Classics Reimagined: the Odyssey.

"Other Media" Capsules:

Things that are comics-related but not necessarily comics (i.e. comics-based movies like Iron Man or Hulk), or that aren't going to be available via comic shops (like comic pack-ins with DVDs) will go in this section when I have any to mention.  They may not be as timely as comic reviews, especially if I decide to review novels that take me a week or two (or ten) to get around to.

Magic is purple.
And green.  And red.

Agatha All Along: Marvel/Disney+ - Technically this did end in October, in that they wrapped up with two episodes on Halloween.  If you want a purely linear story, this is not for you.  On the other hand, if you're cool with nested flashbacks, people unstuck in time, and "here's what was actually happening that you only saw from a deliberately obscured viewpoint five episodes ago" kind of stuff, you'll do well with this series.  Appropriately for the way it plays with time, this series looks both backwards at Agatha Harkness's origins and life, and forwards in terms of setting up a potential Phase Whenever They Get To It protagonist.  While not exactly a musical, there's a lot of diegetic music, and it's pretty good.  Obscure Marvel magic stuff from the comics is mined, although often just for the name (e.g. Jennifer Kale has almost nothing at all in common with the version from the comics), and generally ditching some of the more potentially racist elements of some of the characters thus dug up.  (Marvel's magic scene in the comics is full of Romani, but not by that name, and leaning hard into stereotypes.)  On top of all that, it's sort of cleaning up a bit of the mess left by Multiverse of Madness, which was not exactly the MCU's finest hour in terms of character assassination.  Despite the heavy load it's lifting, the series manages to be pretty self-contained, with flashbacks or other references explaining anything viewers really NEED to know about WandaVision, and mostly focusing on characters who are blank slates in the MCU and so the writers don't assume the viewers know anything about 'em.  The plot threads tie together nicely, and while the door is technically open to a season 2, it's more likely that the followup will be someone else's series with Agatha back to the supporting role.  Oh, and in terms of content warnings, there's a fair amount of sometimes gruesome death, a few seconds of Agatha's bare butt, and technically a Kill Your Gays but It's Complicated.  Recommended.  Currently only on streaming.

Deadpool & Wolverine: Marvel Studios - While previous Deadpool movies have sort of hinted at Deadpool existing in the MCU, or at least a version of it, this one explicitly brings Deadpool into the maddening multiverse with a branch of the TVA being the inciting antagonist as well as the plot device that lets Deadpool team up with Wolverine despite Wolverine being kinda dead.  And he does team up with the dead version of Wolverine, which is as nasty as you might expect.  Seriously, if some of the deaths in Agatha All Along are a bit much for you, what are you doing watching any Deadpool movie at all, much less this one?  The stuff Deadpool does with Wolverine's remains isn't even in the top five "disgusting abuse of the human form played for laughs" for this movie.  The very darkly comedic tone is probably a big part of how they got away with this being only a hard R and not NC-17 for "a bit much even for Americans" violence.  All those warnings out of the way, I did find it funny and it had some good character arcs as well as providing a second chance for a lot of Marvel's abandoned ideas.  Deadpool is solidly part of the wider MCU now, while also being safely on a variant timeline so other movies can ignore his presence if they like.  Recommended with so, SO many warnings and caveats.  Price varies by store and format, also on streaming.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur: The Gatekeeper: Marvel - Okay, normally I avoid reviewing things that I didn't get 100% legally, but this may or may not ever be available legally.  Why?  Because despite Moon Girl already being cancelled anyway at the end of the upcoming season, Disney decided to exercise preemptive obedience to the political atmosphere and yank an episode about trans athletes.  Naturally, copies of it were available within hours of the news of the banning coming out, so I decided to grab one and try to evaluate it on its merits, rather than on the controversy.  This is definitely a Supporting Cast episode, with Luna herself mostly in a cheerleading/moral support role and Devil as part of the comic relief B-plot.  There's some other callbacks to previous seasons, such as the running gag of the supervillain plot device rummage sale, exposition courtesy of the Beyonder, and reference to Brooklyn's nerdy little brother, so it does mesh into the series rather than being just a side trip for a Very Special Episode.  Oh, and it would have been so easy for a show that wallows in retro 70s cartoon tropes to have played this as a Very Special Episode too, but they resisted the temptation.  There is sometimes a jarring tonal dissonance between the comedy beats and Brooklyn's very real struggle to just be herself, but this series does tend to do that kind of thing pretty often, so I guess avoiding the MCU-style bathos would feel wrong.  If all the furor results in it being put back on the schedule, it's definitely worth watching legally.  Whether you find it worth watching through other means depends on the firmness of your stance on piracy, and I'm not going to push anyone to violate such a stance.

I did start reading the second Dreadnought book, but slammed hard into some story elements that really rub me the wrong way, that I find difficult to articulate well enough to explain why I haven't had problems with some similar material (although it does feel a lot like why I couldn't keep going with the Wayward Children books).  So I'm going to let it rest for now.  I did read a "deleted scene" from the upcoming third book on the author's Patreon that might give me the impetus to try again, but for now there's some other stuff on my reading pile I'd rather get through first.

Digital Content:

Unless I find a really compelling reason to do so (such as a lack of regular comics), I won't be turning this into a webcomic review column.  Rather, stuff in this section will generally be full books available for reading online or for download, usually for pay.  I will also occasionally include things I read on Library Pass (check to see if your public library gives access to it), although the interface can be laggy and freeze sometimes.

Nothing this month.  The first of the Adventure Finders epilogues is expected to come out next month.

Manga Collections:

With manga collections coming to dominate my reading habits, I decided to formally split them off from Trades (informally they'd already been split for a while).

Cat + Gamer vol 6: Dark Horse Manga - The "inner thoughts of the cats" elements mostly retreat into end of chapter one-pager bits, which I think is for the better.  Keeping the separation between what the human sees and what the cats experience seems to work well, and breaking that barrier was giving me some "meh" vibes.  In this volume Riko realizes that her kittens have "leveled up" into adult cats, but for the most part the story is "she games, cats do cat things, parallels are drawn" without any significant change to the premise.  No new cats, no one else finds out she has cats, etc.  It's cute and a fun read, but it doesn't seem to want to or even need to go anywhere new right now.  Recommended unless you just Don't Get Cats.  $11.99/$15.99Cn  (Dark Horse doesn't generally put age ratings on their manga, but this is pretty safely all-ages.)

Nyah nyah, Cthulhu ftaghn.

Cthulhu Cat: Dark Horse Manga - A one-shot collecting a bunch of short strips done in a cute and pusheen-ish style, but with the Great Old Ones deciding to take on the forms of cats for their own inscrutable reasons.  Now, this is a cat manga that is definitely going somewhere, but not somewhere you'd want to go in real life.  The creator admits to having come to the Mythos fairly recently, and the treatment is a bit surface-level, trying to cram as much into one volume as possible (including a bit near the end where the author effectively admits that a bunch of names are being tossed out with character designs despite there being no time to actually DO anything with them).  Now, this is not the first time I've seen someone meld together Mythos stuff and cute cats, that would be the defunct webcomic Hello Cthulhu (Mythos in Sanrio style).  But this is a fun take on the mashup, and it has a nicely "creepy but technically safe for kids" vibe to it, like Rosamond from the Nate the Great books.  (Speaking of creepy, when I looked up Nate the Great on Wikipedia I discovered that the series I read as a kid in the 70s is STILL RUNNING.)  Recommended.  $14.99/$19.99Cn  (Again, no ratings, and I suppose it could pass as All Ages?)

Heterogenia Linguistico vol 2: Yen Press - The protagonist and his little band make their way up into the mountains, meeting a few more races but perhaps more importantly learning of a role that seems to transcend species and gender, the Ehyu.  As with almost everything in this series, it's never fully explained (the theme is, after all, incomplete understanding), but they seem to be a sort of shaman class, wandering wise people who seem to have been released from any obligations to clan or race.  The cute little half-werewolf girl who is the linguist's guide considers it to be a viable "what I want to be when I grow up" choice, especially since she now sees the protagonist as her father's successor (well, I'm presuming that...again, it's not exactly made clear that the word she's using means her father's profession rather than his biological role).  As an educator with a degree focus in how people learn (albeit how they learn science, not language), I find this a fascinating puzzle and modeling of the process of learning about languages and the cultures that shape it.  You can't just learn about language or just learn about culture, they're inextricably intertwined, and Salt Seno is doing a very good job of showing this, even if the results can be a little frustrating at times.  Recommended.  $15.00/$19.50Cn  Rated Teen, plus Language (ironically) and Violence.

After God vol 1: Viz Media/Viz Signature - This is sort of "Neon Genesis Evangelion meets Chainsaw Man."  Just replace the creepy giant robots with even creepier human/god hybrids.  The art is definitely going for the same feel as Chainsaw Man, down to some of the facial expressions characters make.  According to the last page, writer/artist Sumi Endo has been getting published for the last ten years, and I guess similarities to Chainsaw Man's art are a result of being shaped by similar influences.  Anyway, like both Evangelion and Chainsaw Man, the world is suffering from the presence of forces either divine or demonic or both, and humanity is slowly losing what seems to be merely a holding action against the gods and monsters.  Suicide by god is a significant social problem...looking a god in the eye is instantly fatal, but many seek out a look anyway because gods are said to also be impossibly beautiful (they don't appear on film, unliving sensors, or in mirrors, so no cheap anti-Medusa tactics).  The two main protagonists are one of the few scientists in the anti-god weapon program who still has some ethics left, and a high school girl named Waka who is intent on killing the gods and might just be able to pull it off because there's Something Special about her.  Of course, because this book just wallows in body horror, that Something Special is also pretty disgusting, even in black and white.  Despite all this, it has a cute talking cat comic relief character to help lighten the mood, which may not work for everyone.  To use blurb-speak, if you like Chainsaw Man, you may well like this, as it has a similar mix of "if I saw that in person I'd throw up" and comic relief to break up the cosmic weirdness and despair.  I'm going to give it another volume at least, but I would not really recommend this to general audiences.  (Looking over the stuff so far in this column, "disgusting horror humor" does seem to be a thing for me lately.  I'm not really into it for the scary or the creepy though, so I may be doing horror wrong.)  $14.99/$19.99Cn/#10.99UK

Asadora! vol 8: Viz Media/Viz Signature - The 1964 arc wraps up in the first half, mostly focusing on Asa's friend the aspiring singer, with the kaiju being mostly backgrounded.  Then the narrative skips ahead to 1968, where Asa is an adult in charge of her own business, the singer has had her one hit and is dealing with the cost of trying to cling to fame, and the other friend is solidly progressing in her pro wrestling career.  And, really, the plot is still dominated by the singer Yone, but with Asa more directly involved in things at this point.  This is the part in the kaiju movie where the human plots pretty much dominate, and it's zoomed in more on the characters than on the "country coming back from war" elements of earlier volumes.  If you're mostly interested in the kaiju bits, this is pretty skippable, with only a few pages tying into the main plot here and there.  The Career Girls plots are decent enough, but I do hope vol 9 gets back to the kaiju more.  Mildly recommended.  $16.99/$22.99Cn/#13.99UK

Expected next month: Kaiju No. 8 Exclusive on the Third Division, Tank Chair vol 2, Magical Girl Incident vol 3 (of 3), Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear vol 10, Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. vol 5.  I've also ordered Heterogenia Linguistico vol 3-5.

Other Trades:

Trade paperbacks, collections, graphic novels, whatever. If it's bigger than a "floppy" but not Manga, it goes here.  

 

"And do you know WHY I'd
like a cup of tea?"

Star Trek Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way: IDW - This is Ryan North's third "choose your own adventure" style book, and the first that is a comic.  As regular readers of North's work should probably be expecting, there's math to do, and deliberate cheating (there is, however, the traditional orphan page you can't actually get to even with the required mathematical cheating).  Of course, since a comic, even a graphic novel sized one clocking in at 196 pages not counting the extras in back, is going to have a much more limited space for options, you can find the secret options pretty easily if you don't feel like doing math.  North also plays with the "you died again" aspect of CYOAs, by making it a part of the story itself.  All in all, it does feel like it would make a good episode of the show.  Recommended.  $24.99/$33.99Cn

Primer: Clashing Colors TPB: DC - Wow, an original character YA GN getting her own starring role sequel, it's almost like they've decided people actually liked the new characters after all.  This actually came out as a miniseries of floppies this year, but I didn't become aware of it (DC solicits are a hassle to track) until the collected edition was announced, so I just ordered that.  But hey, the collection is printed at the same size as the original Primer OGN, so it will fit next to it on the shelf.  Mostly the same creative team as the first as well, but a second person is added to art, although neither the credits nor the creator profiles clarify how the art duties have been split up.  The story picks up a vague but not terribly long time after the end of the first book, with Primer having made a splash as a local hero, if not seen as a very serious one.  The Teen Titans (who seem to be mostly the pre-Go cartoon Teen Titans in personality and abilities, rather than the ones in the YA GN volumes by Kimi Garcia that I haven't really been reading) end up in Washington DC on the trail of Deathstroke, who himself seems to be seeking a macguffin that the Titans are trying to protect.  Primer does not make a good impression, but does seem to have at least one fan, a new girl at her school.  Yeah, readers who know anything about Deathstroke (or who read the Priest series, at least) will see the plot twist coming a mile off, but given the intended audience it can be forgiven.  For people who are several times older than the target audience, it's less a plot twist and more an easter egg.  Recommended.  $12.99/$17.50Cn for all ages.

The Little Trashmaid vol 2: Silly Studios - This volume introduces some more characters, such as the Flares (a sort of street gang of merfolk who see themselves as an elite guard for Tidy's father, the king) and goes in for slightly longer arcs now that the creators have established the characters and situations.  Still wordless other than occasional signs.  The tone continues to be broad physical comedy over an undercurrent of tragedy and pain.  Not just the overt environmental message, one of the human protagonists storms out of his house after an argument with his mother, although the reader is left guessing at the details, and it never does seem to resolve (the kid does end up back home later on, but it feels more like the plot was just dropped rather than being dealt with).  Recommended. $20 plus shipping from Italy, which is actually charged properly this time ($17, as opposed to the $5 I was charged for vol 1).

Expected next month: Cursed Princess Club vol 4 (of 4), Empowered vol 12

Floppies:

No, I don't have any particular disdain for the monthlies, but they are floppy, yes? (And not all of them come out monthly, or on a regular schedule in general, so I can't just call this section "Monthlies" or even "Periodicals" as that implies a regular period.)

Fantastic Four #26: Marvel - There's been a lot of "just two of the Four" stories from North, and this "biding their time until they're allowed to do the Doom War" issue shows why Reed and Johnny are a very dangerous pair.  Reed's main criterion is "Will this produce interesting results?" and Johnny's is "Will this produce awesome results?" and that combination tends to end in some sort of explosion or other hazard to local or wider reality.  Perhaps a bit silly at times (why does the blood-vomiting skull have a tiny hat?), but amusing enough.  Mildly recommended.  $3.99

Venom War: Fantastic Four One-Shot: Marvel - I don't care about the Venom War crossover, I got this because it's written by Adam Warren and plays with time travel in interesting ways, featuring the Fantastic Four snatched from between moments during the Simonson run where they were using the "Rosebud II" time sled.  And, frankly, this isn't really a Venom War crossover in any meaningful way, it could've been any fight scene happening in any book at this time, it's all about the convoluted schemes of Doom and Kang throughout the timestream.  While technically not truly standalone, it's more connected to old Fantastic Four continuity than current Venom War.  Recommended.  $4.99

Moon Knight Fist of Khonshu #1: Marvel - Another #1 for Jed MacKay and Moon Knight, and it's a fresh start.  Moon Knight has a new problem in town and has gone to introduce himself.  This is intercut with discussion between Detective Flint (from way back in the original Moench series) and a new Detective who's determined to get the white-clad lunatic off her streets.  Very expository, but a lot of it is captions over Moon Knight beating his way through the goons of the new druglord threat.  A few good bits, but really more for new readers than existing ones.  Mildly recommended if you've been reading MacKay's Moon Knight for a while, but a good place to start if you're curious.  $4.99

Ultraman x Avengers #2 (of 4): Marvel - About half of this issue feels like an excuse for writer Higgins to do some Avengers and Spider-Man schtick, albeit some amusing schtick.  There's a bit of macguffin hunt, helping bring some of the Ultraman cast up into parity for the big fight scene (well, against Galactus, so there's not a lot they can do to get up to his level).  True to how he's been portrayed, Ultraman does try to negotiate with Galactus, but since there's two more issues left it's not really a spoiler to say that it does not work.  Mildly recommended.  $4.99

My Adventures With Superman #5-6 (of 6): DC - There's only so many ways things can go for characters introduced in an interquel like this, and Josie Campbell doesn't exactly surprise with the resolution here, which also seemed to dance around making an explicit Iron Giant reference.  The big plot device introduced at the end of #5 also seems to be deliberately playing up the Evangelion motifs seen in season 2's climax.  I guess the story itself doesn't really grab me, given that I'm more focused on the easter eggs.  Mildly recommended.  $3.99 each.

Gatchaman: Galactor #2-3 (of 4): Mad Cave - Berg Katse continues to work on cleaning up loose ends without letting Leader X know that those ends were loose in the first place, and the details of his mutation start to come out (if not the gender instability seen in the original Gatchaman anime, at least not yet).  The crime family that formed the original basis for Galactor wasn't 100% killed off, and in the decades since it has rebuilt with an eye towards vengeance.  Yeah, that part is important to the setting, and how Gatchaman differs from Battle of the Planets...the alien invasion plan's roots were laid down about 20 years ago, and it built up in the shadows until fairly recently before springing out into the public eye.  Along the way, we get a view of how Galactor is rather more idealistic than the U.S. translation (or, frankly, the regular Gatchaman title) would have us believe.  Their goal, at least as far as everyone but Berg Katse is concerned, is to save humanity from itself.  They do not hire sociopaths or mere thugs, everyone needs to be on board with the heroic mission.  A lot of the time when childhood nostalgia properties get revived, they make it more "adult" by just adding in violence and moral grayness, and there's certainly been a lot more blood and killing in Mad Cave's Gatchaman books than in Battle of the Planets (if perhaps not much more than in the source material!).  Making things adult by making the antagonists heroic is a less common choice than making the protagonists unheroic, and I support it.  Keeping in mind that I am right in the target age for Battle of the Planets nostalgia and I'm in my 50s, setting up a war where even the most snarling of villains is actually trying to save the world adds welcome moral complexity.  (Of course, the heroes as child soldiers is harder to push aside in that case too, so we have the "heroes who aren't that heroic" element too.)  Recommended.  $4.99 each, rated Teen+.

Gatchaman #4: Mad Cave - Mostly a Jun story, but the beta team finally gets taken off the mantlepiece and fired.  And, as a Jun story, there's rather more upskirt shots than are strictly necessary.  Also, rather a lot of killing and blood spatter.  If the Galactor miniseries above is trying to add some nuance to the story, the main book seems to be leaning into simple "people die in war" attitudes, and the Galactor mech commander seems to have slipped past the "no sociopaths" screening.  Orlando and Bunn may need to coordinate a little better on tone?  Mildly recommended.  $4.99, rated Teen.

Vampirella #672: Dynamite - Vampirella herself only shows up in flashbacks and imaginings, but this installment of the Dark World story is shaped around a Vampirella-shaped hole.  Dracula and Nyx are trying to track Vampi down (he's been a few steps behind her for several months now), while Draculina is stuck in a pile of lethal metaphors in her perception of the Dark World, which continues to be depicted as uninked and uncolored pencil art (albeit very tight pencils, and lacking some of the usual elements of pencils intended for inking and coloring).  Gotta admit, some of the bits with Draculina come awfully close to a character complaining about their writer's creative decisions, although she never quite blames it on anyone other than the Dark World itself, whatever it really is.  Oddly, Silva's art looks better in the pencils-only Dark World segments than in the fully done Dracula scenes, Silva may be putting too much on the colorist's back in the inked pages.  Recommended.  $4.99

My Little Pony Classics Reimagined: the Odyssey: IDW - This uses the framing sequence of Pinkie Pie returning from the Great Trojan Baking Competition to tell bits and pieces of the Odyssey as well as several other Greek myths as told to Pinkie in her travels.  My first reaction to this premise was, "Why did they feel the need to pad out the ODYSSEY?  It's not exactly short...it is in fact notorious as being the opposite of that!"  (Greek myth was my first "fandom" at age 5-6, and the Odyssey was the first one I read in a version not simplified for kids, being from my English teacher mom's collection.  It was a slog at the time.)  But by the time I was about halfway through, I saw the point of it.  The Odyssey is also very much a one character show, and the side stories let them use the rest of the Mane Six without having to elevate some really obscure side characters.  Also, to be honest, Odysseus is a jerk, and there's not a lot of tales within the Odyssey that can be told wherein the pony playing him wouldn't look like a jerk.  Discord gets to return in this one as Hades, and he's getting tired of all the "defanged" stories (Romeo and Juliet where nobody dies, Little Women where nobody dies, etc.), so naturally Fluttershy is Persephone and tells him to hush.  The stories adapted in this book are definitely far less rapey than the original myths, which are pretty bad even in the absence of Zeus, although they do sometimes have to twist in pretzels to avoid giving the Wrong Message by modern standards.  Atalanta isn't forced to wed, just forced to have a friend, for instance, but her agency is still being taken away by her father.  Recommended mostly as an interesting writing puzzle.  $7.99 (80 pages).

Expected next month: Might be another month off from floppies.  Two from this month were one-shots and won't be out again, one of my titles finished, and only one (Lower Decks ongoing) is has started up after the comics above were shipped.  There might not be enough to warrant shipping costs again until January.

Dvandom, aka Dave Van Domelen, is an Associate Professor of Physical Science at Amarillo College, maintainer of one of the two longest-running Transformers fansites in existence (neither he nor Ben Yee is entirely sure who was first), did not overeat on Thanksgiving, is an occasional science advisor in fiction, and part of the development team for the upcoming City of Titans MMO.

 

"Whatever -- just SHOOT THE METAPHOR--!!" - Adam Wendel, Vampirella #672