Items of Note (Strongly Recommended or otherwise worthy): Cursed Princess Club vol 4
In this installment: Basilisk, Adventure Finders Epilogue 1, Chainsaw Man vol 17, Spy x Family vol 13, The Great Cleric vol 12, After God vol 2, Marvel-Verse Moon Knight, Cursed Princess Club vol 4, Ultraman x Avengers #3 (of 4), Fantastic Four #27, Moon Knight Fist of Khonshu #2-3, Gatchaman Galactor #4 (of 4), Gatchaman #5, Gatchaman Jun: Apex Heart (one-shot), Vampirella #673
"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.
Nothing this month. I did get and watch the restoration BluRay set of Bubblegum Crash, which is kinda sorta linked to comics, but while they did a good job on the visuals the voice acting was mediocre and the story not that good. (Sometimes, things being as good as you remember from decades ago is not a compliment.)
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.
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.
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| A face a mother could love. |
Adventure Finders Epilogue 1: Patreon.com - Looks like the format of the epilogues is going to be a done-in-one story about a member of the supporting cast, then part of a longer story following a major cast member (or just Clari). This one has the sea elf Methiada's epilogue followed by the start of Clari's epilogue. Epic-log? Anyway, Methiada's bit is basically a lot of dialogue and discussion of plans which may or may not come to pass within a human lifetime, but Clari's is an old-fashioned Scouring of the Shire. Just because the dragon is no more does not mean that the priests who claimed him to be a god are gone, or even without power, and they will have their petty vengeances. Clariette makes a little better time in returning than the Hobbits did, though.... Recommended. Access for $2/month or more.
Manga Collections:
Most of these are "tankobon" or collections of work serialized in a weekly or monthly publication, although some were written directly for the collection. All of them have been translated from Japanese (or maybe Korean, although I don't think I'm reading any manhwa) into English. Things with a manga aesthetic but done in English originally will go in one of the sections below as appropriate.
Chainsaw Man vol 17: Viz Media/Shonen Jump - Denji really acts more brain-damaged than usual this volume, which may be intended as an indication of how much he depends on being Chainsaw Man. I mean, he did get chopped up and tossed in a dumpster in volume 1, only being saved by Pochita (the Chainsaw Demon) merging with him. Perhaps he needs to power up every so often to keep his brainmeats from decaying. Or maybe the writer's just leaning hard on cheap gags. Hard to tell, as Tatsuki has gone through a few "bored now" phases lately. To the extent the last few issues have had a mystery element, the facts are revealed as the plot-movers brag about it. Mildly recommended. $11.99/$15.99Cn/#8.99UK, rated Older Teen.
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| Source of most of Yor's bad ideas. |
After God vol 2: Viz Signature - This is definitely one of those serials where the author isn't really writing for the trade, so we get a somewhat scattershot collection this time, where the tone is a bit inconsistent. The end of the testing fight, new living arrangements, meeting and hanging out with wacky new neighbor, a day out on the town getting to know some of the others from the institute interrupted by a giant snake, etc. Almost every chapter ends on something like a cliffhanger (although the one introducing the wacky neighbor didn't really seem to address it in the next chapter), so the tankobons have a good chance of hitting a strong ending anyway. The volume ends with a Big Reveal about Waka's status and something about the motivations of the gods. It could stand to be a little less "what I felt like writing today" and more coherent, but there's some interesting stuff in the mix. Recommended. $14.99/$19.99Cn/#10.99UK, rated Older Teen (for monstery viscera and body horror, plus weaponized heresy)
The Great Cleric vol 12: Kodansha - Lots of thrilling city council meetings and logistics to start with (hey, he was Japan's Greatest Salaryman before reincarnating, that side needs to shine through sometimes), and then it's off to the Scary Forest to grind out some gathering for construction materials so that the urban renewal plans can be enacted. And monsters attack, just in time to keep Lionel from getting too bored. There were a few places I had trouble keeping this separate from Easygoing Territory Defense and Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear because of all the focus on infrastructure improvement (and the appearance of bearfolk who are even cuter than Yuna's summons), but I guess that's what I get for having a story type I favor. The romantic elements are definitely back-benched, so the addition of a bunch of new women to the cast doesn't feel like it's turning into a harem manga. Recommended. $12.99/$17.99Cn, rated Older Teen 16+ (also doesn't really need it this volume, even the combat scenes are fairly mild).
Expected next month: Easygoing Territory Defense vol 4, Magilumiere Magical Girls vol 6, Go Go Loser Ranger vol 12, Kaiju No. 8 vol 12, Cat + Gamer vol 7. Shipments from B&N have gotten slower lately, taking a week or so past the release date to arrive, so the last two probably won't be in my hands until March. (Update: Go Go Loser Ranger 12 got pushed back to March.)
Other Trades:
Trade paperbacks, collections, graphic novels, whatever. If it's bigger than a "floppy" but not Manga, it goes here.
Trade paperbacks, collections, graphic novels, whatever. If it's bigger than a "floppy" but not Manga, it goes here.
Marvel-Verse Moon Knight: Marvel - This actually came out in 2022, but I found it on the shelf at Ollie's for $2.99 and a quick skim showed I hadn't read any of the stories in it. Printed at smaller than standard comics but larger than most manga collections, it seems intended as a cheap intro to a character who's important to or new to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Others in the series advertised on the inside front cover are Black Widow, Thanos, Iron Man, Captain America, Venom, and "Wandavision." Ollie's only had the Thanos and Moon Knight ones, but also had an unrelated Black Widow collection of her appearances in team-up books like Marvel Team-Up or Two-In-One.) It leads off with the original Werewolf by Night stories introducing the character...and almost everything about him got retconned by the time he got his own comic a decade later. In this story, mercenary Marc Spector is hired by the Committee to capture the werewolf, and they give him his costume, weapons, and even tell him to call himself Moon Knight. Oddly, they chose to not reprint any of the later origin stories, instead having "material from" an Amazing Spider-Man issue set around the time Moon Knight's solo book was starting in the early 80s, #13 of his 80s book, and then the lead story from 2019's Moon Knight Annual (which I didn't get at the time, mostly because it was two years before I started reading MacKay's take on the character, plus it was part of a megacrossover and I was already avoiding those by 2019). The Annual is a weird choice for many reasons, not least the fact that it doesn't really explain much about what's going on beyond "Kang is Doing Things and Khonshu doesn't care for it." It's the only story in the collection to even bring up Khonshu, I guess they were expecting any potential readers to get the Khonshu story from the D+ series. However, if all you had to go on was this collection, you'd assume that the 1970s origin was still true, that mercenary Marc Spector had been very successful and set up Steven Grant as an identity to launder his cash (which is basically what happened) and that he was just a well-trained fighter with the money to throw at Batman-style gadgets...and then the Annual comes along and why is there a cowboy Moon Knight? Who is Khonshu and why does he sometimes have a bird skull head? Frankly, a bad choice, but maybe it was the only thing with the right page count out of modern stories to fill in the rest of the collection after they picked the other four issues. An interesting curiosity, and worth picking up for $2.99 if you have an Ollie's nearby, but it definitely shows the signs of being a cheap cash-in collection. Cover price $9.99/$12.50Cn
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| "We're all mad here. Well, at least slightly irked." |
Expected next month: Hilo volume 11 is expected for early February. However, unless a crowdfunded comic ships soon, that's it for this category for the month.
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.)
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.)
Diamond's bankruptcy was not without warning signs. For instance, every single issue of Lower Decks was extremely shorted, damaged to the point of being unsellable, or outright lost on its way to my shop. So none of them this month, and I might have to just wait and hope there's a TPB soon. Everything else I ordered did make it, although it sounds like if I had been picking up books weekly there'd have been a lot more obviously delayed titles for me.
Ultraman x Avengers #3 (of 4): Marvel - This is mostly various Ultras fighting kaiju who have been roused up by Galactus's presence, while the Avengers help a little, mostly distractions and search & rescue operations. And all for a big plan which amounts to destroying Galactus's siphon machine, which has never been shown to stop him, just slow him down. About all it accomplishes is to alert Galactus to the existence of a tastier meal, which could also have been done at the end of #2. This issue ends up feeling like mostly padding and an excuse for some more fight scenes, as if the series had originally been planned to have 3 issues' worth of material stretched into four by the addition of backup stories (something the regular Ultraman Marvel comics have done a fair amount) but then the backups got cancelled and they had to stretch it out. Mildly recommended. $4.99
Fantastic Four #27: Marvel - A Nicki Masters-Grimm focus story. For reasons I don't recall, Alicia and Ben adopted a Skrull daughter and Kree son prior to the events of the Ryan North series. They were completely off-screen for the first year due to the whole "time-displaced Baxter Building" plot, and have been mostly supporting cast for Franklin and Valeria stories since then. (Pause to go wiki-looking.) Okay, VERY shortly before the events of this series. And while she's not supposed to have any sort of Super- or Power-Skrull treatments (just a memory/skill implant), in this issue she demonstrates what seems like abilities beyond the standard Skrull range. Anyway, the real point is not what powers she has, but how she's trying to find a cultural fit for herself, given that her upbringing was basically a combination of Skinner box and cage match (something I had to get from a wiki, North hasn't really brought up anything about her beyond being a Skrull). I think my main problem is that North focuses this story so much on who Nicki wants to become that he neglects to make sure the readers really know what she was to begin with. This is hardly a case of "you don't need to show Spider-Man's origin, everyone knows by now," her background has at most been a passing mention in this book. Mildly recommended. $3.99
Moon Knight Fist of Khonshu #2-3: Marvel - As suggested in #1, the corrupt police officer introduced then raids the Midnight Mission, and the team goes on the run as fugitives from the law. "Not even my fifth rodeo," as Soldier puts it. (Not really a spoiler to say that Chekov's gun was fired.) #2 is all build-up to this, while #3 is the heroes scrambling to react and escape since murdering corrupt cops is still illegal. No, Frank, it matters. Anyway. As far as the main plot goes, I have no beef. But it feels like the execution of it was pretty plot-devicey. Another character we only first saw in #1 turns out to be able to do a thing that totally changes the game...I get that MacKay might have felt he'd written himself into a corner and made Moon Knight too unassailable, but the way he stripped Marc et al of that protection while also doing the cliche "new character is a total badass" display felt kind of like he was phoning it in. Mildly recommended. $3.99 each.
Gatchaman Galactor #4 (of 4): Mad Cave - One of the challenges of writing villains is that if they always lose, it's hard to take them seriously, but if the heroes ever fail to stop them (in the end, at least, after initial setbacks) it's hard to take the heroes seriously. A common solution is to do what this miniseries has done, and have bad guys succeed in plots against other bad guys, especially if the other bad guys were introduced for the express purpose of being a credible threat and don't need to survive past the end of the story. This issue, after being on the ropes occasionally in the first three issues, it's all about Berg Katse, SOOOOOPER Genius, enacting terrible and ironic vengeance on those who would dare overthrow him. It works pretty well, with Steve Orlando writing Berg as a smug version of Batman or Midnighter (who Orlando has also written), perhaps a bit more overconfident than the heroes, but it's earned. Recommended. $4.99
Gatchaman #5: Mad Cave - Meanwhile, the main book finally finishes the fight that happened between panels of Galactor #1, thanks to just about everyone disobeying orders and pissing Dr. Nambu off. This is supposed to be a big payoff, but it's only okay, not helped by the art sometimes looking like Batista was in a hurry and having trouble following the model sheets for the show characters (and the "beta flight" characters continue to look like they're not even in the same book, with normal Western comics faces compared to the main team's big anime eyes). I think part of the problem is that what makes the core book tick hasn't quite been sorted out yet. Is it the main team together? Is it the trainees? Focusing on replicating the feel of the original anime? Trying to tell new stories? The side stories and spinoffs have generally been a lot stronger, because each of them had a clear goal and they worked on it. Or it may just be that Bunn is a weaker writer than the others. Mildly recommended. $4.99
Gatchaman Jun: Apex Heart (one shot): Mad Cave - Speaking of side stories, here's a focus on Jun the Swan, written by Tommy Lee Edwards. While the Gatchaman originals weren't quite as bad about it as the Battle of the Planets dubs, Jun/Princess has generally suffered from being The Girl, defined by her relationships (big sister to Jinpei/Keyop, team mom, etc) than her own interests. Apex Heart addresses that by glomming onto a bit of her civilian identity: she's a biker girl, in the same way that Joe/Mark is a racecar driver or Ken/Keith is a pilot. Also, as the main series just emphasized, she's prone to solo missions, going undercover and deep into potential enemy territory, putting the ninja into science ninja. This story looks at a mystery tied to Jun's past and part of why she got into motorcycling. It does drift more into Galactor being cruel and evil as an end in itself, but expecting every Gatchaman story to present Galactor as almost-sympathetically as the Galactor series did is unfair. This is also a nice twist on the common visual riff of Galactor agents being identical, masked threats with negligible humanity. Artist Nuno Plati does a decent job of staying on-model without looking too much like tracing over animation cels. Recommended. $6.99 (32 story pages)
Vampirella #673: Dynamite - There's a comics/SFF trope wherein it's a really bad idea to acquire the power to shape reality to your every whim when you have even a hint of suicidal ideation or even self-loathing. The moment your control slips, you might accidentally kill yourself with a stray negative thought. And that's basically been the premise of this arc, because in the Dark World, strong emotions become reality, and Draculina has multiple lifetimes' worth of issues that have been working themselves out in the form of a city's worth of monsters trying to kill her. Her conscious mind mostly wants to live, but both her personal memories and those of Katie (with whom she shares the Dark World, after the fashion of Rick Jones and Mar-Vell) contain plenty of "I just wanna die" vibes. This much was pretty clear already, but in this installment it gets spelled out explicitly, while also being made abundantly clear to Draculina herself. (The real Vampirella would probably be more gentle about it, but she hasn't really been in her own book for a bit, just Draculina's phantom monster view of her sister.) Silva continues to use the "tight pencils on art board" approach for things explicitly in the Dark World and more traditional full color art for the scenes that are supposedly Katie's memories but which might just be another aspect of the Dark World. Recommended. $4.99
Expected next time: If the missing books from the past two months actually show up, I might be able to justify a February shipment. Likely otherwise just continuations of the ongoings from above, plus the next Gatchaman side series, One Earth, and the My Little Pony Rise of Cadance one-shot (hopefully, I missed it in Previews and need to hope my store gets enough to pull one for me).
Note, between Diamond's issues and the threatened tariff war's expected impact on periodicals that are mostly printed in Canada, the supply of new comics might drop off sharply this year. Even if some companies shift to a more aggressive ebook distribution style, the unpaid Diamond bills and the costs of filling existing print orders may well put a lot of smaller publishers entirely out of business. We'll cross that bridge once it's on fire, I guess.
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), got to remove a utility closet door from its hinges because the frame got warped, is an occasional science advisor in fiction, and part of the development team for the upcoming City of Titans MMO.
I am resplendent in plum and scarlet, with two great horns adorning my cowl. I do not blend in. And that is perfectly fine. - Berg Katse narrating himself, Gatchaman Galactor #4 (of 4)
Dave's Capsules for January 2025
Reviewed by Dvandom
on
Thursday, January 30, 2025
Rating:
Reviewed by Dvandom
on
Thursday, January 30, 2025
Rating:
