This week, a solid one when it comes to positive female characters, kicks off with a raucous thrill ride of a comic from IDW, Wild Blue Yonder #1. Set in a world where Earth is nearly destroyed by pollution and radiation, people have climbed to the highest points of land available, and taken to the skies. It’s a new frontier overhead, and the wildest jet jockey around is Cola, a wild child with an angry Labrador for a co-pilot (the dog doesn’t fly the plane, it’s not that kind of sci-fi). Cola has recently recruited herself a new gunner for her two seat jet bomber, needing his help to defend her family and its flying freighter against a villain known as The Judge. The book has a great post-WWII look about it, with a bit of a high-flying Western feel. Cola might be a fairly stock character at first glance – a pilot who acts on instinct and relies on talent over tactics – but she’s a good egg, devoted to family even when her commanding officer is also her overbearing mother, Olivia. The dynamic between the two women is the backbone of this rather original tale, and it’s certainly got my attention.
Family dynamics play an unexpected part in Extinction Parade #1 from World War Z author Max Brooks and artist Raulo Caceres. (We first mentioned this story in a brief Q&A with Brooks.) This highly anticipated book follows two vampire sisters, as they watch a zombie plague destroy the planet. At first, their haughty arrogance dismisses the threat of the “subdead”, as they claim to have seen it before. However, older sister Min’s hubris, and the headstrong romance between younger sister Laila and the vampire Aston, gets them into more trouble than they ever imagined. These women offer a fantastic take on the vampire myth, with little of their humanity left at all. The hunt is their pleasure, and they have nothing but disdain for “solbreeders” (including an amusing dig at both Ann Rice and the Twilight franchise). By the end of the first book you are almost rooting against them, deserving as they are of a good zombie comeuppance, if there is to be one. Mr. Caceres’ artwork is vivid and bloody, and he fills every inch of the page with the rampages of the undead, in true style of Avatar Comics, who also publish the highly popular Crossed horror title. The book hints at themes of both entitlement and economic injustice, and the war between the undead have and have-nots is about to get really nasty. This one will be worth following as well.
Indie outfit Black Mask Studios is back this week with Liberator #1, perhaps the first ever animal rights superhero book. Damon Guerrero is a barista by day, and a dog loving revolutionary activist by night. Donning a ski mask, Damon destroys a dog fighting outpost after freeing the dogs (and finding them all rescue adoptions as well, it turns out). He’s got quite the thing for his boss, fellow activist Jeanette, but he sees her non-violent form of protest as ineffective, preferring direct action to passive restraint. Jeanette isn’t afraid to spend the night in jail (or to swear at policemen), but Damon is willing to go farther. But do his actions cross a line? On one page he’s discussing the involved planning process in order to destroy a fur farm; on another he’s jumping people on the street out of the blue. While some are dog abusers who are clearly starving an animal, another was just an uncle greeting his nephew, not the pedophile Damon suspected. The question of where belief turns to activism, and activism becomes vigilantism is an intriguing one, and will be worth exploring along with this book.
Next up is an example of one of my favorite types of releases, the #0 issue. Dark Horse reboots a classic radio character this week with Captain Midnight #0. Captain Jim “Red” Albright is the titular hero, a brilliant military scientist who donned a cap and mask to fight Fascists during WWII, heading up the Secret Squadron. The original radio serials were highly popular, and noted in their time for featuring female character who held their own, including Captain Midnight’s fighter pilot/love interest Joyce Ryan. (She often rescued The Captain instead of the other way around.) Here, Joyce is an elderly woman in modern times, while Captain Midnight has been mysteriously transported from the 1940’s to today. He’s loath to discuss his last secret mission with anyone, including the modern day armed forces of his own country, as he’s not sure whom to trust. Meanwhile, his modern day colleagues fall somewhere between hero worship and outright disbelief, and Captain Midnight is on the run before you can say 12 o’clock. This is an exciting adventure tale and it does what many issue #0’s do so well by setting up a story without giving too much away. There’s a lot more going on here behind the scenes, and the book almost reads like the second or third chapter of a story that’s already begun. Hopefully issue #1 will shed more light on the proceedings.
Brian Azzarello returns to the world of 100 Bullets with his new mini-series Brother Lono #1. Like its predecessor, this story is rampant with abject violence and none too little gore, as it sets the stage for Brother Lono to protect a nun named Sister June from a group of kingpins. Sadly, it’s hard to tell exactly who the kingpins are or aren’t. There are several rather nasty characters depicted here, alternately torturing a handful of captured victims without much plot to drive their actions. The story feels mostly like an excuse for Azzarello to wallow in violence and for artist Eduardo Risso to draw severed appendages. The Latino characters here are the villains, while the White lady is the victim to be rescued (who, did we mention, is also a nun in short shorts for some reason?). The opening page even states that some of the captions are “Translated from Mexican!”, further venturing into both exploitative and racist territory. Where is the line between exploitation and the darkly comic take, the type Robert Rodriguez refers to as “Mex-ploitation”? It’s clear that Azzarello wants that line to run right through the heart of his book, but he may have missed the mark.
Finally, there are two big time franchises getting new series this week, neither of them much to speak of. If you’re an X-Files fan you’ll probably want my head for this, but IDW’s The X-Files Season 10 #1 isn’t much to believe in. Supposedly set after the end of the series and both movies, it sees Scully and Mulder posing as a married couple in protective custody. Someone has hacked the X-Files, and seems to want one or both of them dead. Ultimately, this doesn’t have the feel of the original show, and I was too distracted by the artists attempt to accurately depict the faces of Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny. IDW also brings us yet another giant-robots-that-are-really-cars-or-dinosaurs-or-handguns-or-jets-or-radios series with Transformers: Monstrosity #1. There isn’t much to say about this one, really. It’s set at the beginning of the Great Transformers War, if that’s a thing, when Optimus Prime was the newly crowned head of the Autobots, and Megatron was proving his mettle as a nasty bugger on an abandoned scrap metal planet. There’s little to speak of socially here, as there are no women, or people of color, or really even people at all, making it ultimately just a comic for little kids who like giant-robots-that-are-really-cars-or-dinosaurs-or-handguns-or-jets-or-radios. It’s also the print edition of what was a digital first series, which seems appropriate for giant-robots-that-are-really-cars-or … well, you get the point.
