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It’s a slower than usual week for new stories, but a plentiful one if you’re seeking out great female characters. Almost every #1 issue I looked at this week features a woman as the main character, from plucky assassins to spoiled young adult children of super-heroes. Although, I’m afraid, the word pants pops again quite a bit this week: a lack of pants, more specifically. But does this mean these aren’t all positive portrayals? Let’s find out.

First up this week is Amala’s Blade #1. I made brief mention of the prequel issue #0 a few weeks back, and upon reread for this week I’ve found its charm growing on me. In her first full issue here, Amala has matured a great deal. The most sought after and skilled assassin in her realm, Alama’s skills are in as much demand as her head. Sadly, she feels her head isn’t on quite straight, tormented as she is by the ghosts of those she’d killed. Now, the masters who feel she’s grown to boisterous for their liking are sending her on a suicide mission. Being boisterous, though, is exactly what makes Amala such an appealing character, here and in her previous adventures in Dark Horse Presents. More than capable of holding her own in a fight, Amala is also teaching her friend Ren swordplay. (Although why she also falls into his arms and kisses him is beyond me, however.) It’s not so much surrendering her power over to her emotional engagement, but that it’s so ham-handed that it just seems out of place in the narrative. This book has considerably less charm than its #0 prequel, and we’ll have to wait and see if the ongoing series recovers. Continue reading →

This week in new #1 releases – and in our new Friday time slot – we’ve got tales of D’jinn and Jedi alike, new series from some childhood favorite franchises, and a whole slew of interesting female characters leading the way.

IDW’s Danger Girl: Trinity #1 is an all-female espionage thriller, providing a new jumping off point for all three of its heroines with separate story arcs within the same book, each from a different artist. For those unfamiliar, Danger Girl debuted in 1998, created by J. Scott Campbell and writer Andy Hartnell who penned this issue as well. These tales of female spies and adventurers are influenced both by 007 and Indiana Jones. (The opening scene of Trinity is practically copied from Harrison Ford’s opening action scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, complete with an ancient artifact and an exploding freighter.) The three Danger Girls of the title – Abby Chase, and the sisters Sydney and Sonja Savage – are tough and determined, from recovering treasure on the high seas to bounty hunting in the deepest jungles. You have to admire three women who can hold their own against thugs and assassins, but unfortunately, I can’t help but wish that they weren’t introduced to the audience in such a hyper-sexualized way. Many feminists see nothing wrong with using femininity and sexuality as a source of empowerment, but in this book it’s tough to tell if that’s the case, or if the artists are merely exploiting a certain demographic by showing the women in their underwear or scanty leather bustiers. The same criticism can be applied to the next two titles reviewed her. In this instance, the blurry line left me with little remembrance of the plot of DG:Trinity, merely an hour after finishing the book, and that ultimately puts me off the title going forward. I’ve been wrong before, however, and my mind may change. Continue reading →

This week on comic store shelves, we’ve got a whole universe of superheroes in one corner and a new take on military adventure in another. Plus, we’ve got zombies vs. aliens, brother vs. sister, and one super-powered Rock and Roll Legend vs. the end of the world.

IDW Publishing takes center stage this week with no less than four new #1 issues, re-launching and spinning off several franchises. First up is G.I. Joe: The Cobra Files #1. I have a soft spot for G. I. Joe, as it was the first comic I ever bought as a little geek, so I admittedly hold IDW’s treatment of the franchise to a pretty high standard. In the IDW universe, the rebuilt Joe team is fighting old nemesis Cobra on several fronts, and this is the story of their clandestine work against Cobra operatives, headed by the ex-Cobra spy Chameleon. Chameleon, whose real name is Erika Le Tene (it’s refreshing to find out characters from a G.I. Joe story have real names) has defected to the Joes after several attempts by Cobra to assassinate her. She works with long time field leader Flint, rooting out current and former Cobra operatives hiding among us. Le Tene isn’t a character of moral integrity but she does have a conflicted psyche when it comes to her past misdeeds, and she doesn’t see her work with the team any more morally sound than her old job. Whiel she’s not a particularly complicated character (though the writers might like you to think she is, as we first meet her in her psychiatrist’s office in the midst of therapy), she’s still a capable and strong one. In Lady J in this story, we’re also treated to a more world-weary version of a normally stalwart G.I. Joe character, bemoaning the never ending conflict and how little good it might be doing for the world. A sense of regret over the lack of value in the Joes’ work is a theme that populates this book, making for darker and somewhat drier reading than we’ve seen in previous Joe adventures. While I have to admit I’m pleased with IDW for creating a female lead for a G. I. Joe series who breaks the mold and isn’t over-sexualized, I don’t know that the story is original enough, or the characters surrounding her rich enough, to carry this book very far. Continue reading →

This week’s #1 releases hit some of the heavy spots again. Marvel continues to get spacey, preparing us for the summer movie season; fans of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series have new mysteries to ponder; Dark Horse revives Hellboy’s buddy Abe Sapien; a classic femme fatale from the 1930’s is reborn; and gamers get a preview of new stuff from Naughty Dog. First, the highlights of the week.

The best of this week’s offerings is Polarity #1, from Boom! Studios, with art by Jorge Coelho and a script (and free music download) by Max Bemis of the band Say Anything. It’s the story of Tim, a depressed Brooklyn painter who’s finally come to grips with his own mental health after a near fatal hit and run suicide attempt. He’s fully medicated now, and his art career is finally moving forward, but he’s not happy at all. Drowsy and muddled in a sea of anti-depressants and bi-polar meds, Tim has lost his edge. He is turning an ugly and unforgiving eye on the people around him, and losing connection with humanity, including his girlfriend Alexis (whom he never particularly cared for) and his best friend Adam. After failing to impress the girl he’s really interested in, college mate Lily, Tim decides that enough is pharmaceutically enough, and drops his pills and his therapist for the “real-life” experience of self-medicating with stale weed, too much beer, not enough sleep, and television binging. As his mind begins to spiral out of control his paranoia mounts, bringing on some startling revelations about his therapist and his neighbors. Is he truly unbalanced, or are they suppressing his supernatural abilities? Polarity has some uninteresting, albeit funny, things to say about hipster culture, and a good many more interesting things to say about mental health care. In a story with a great deal of reality for even the super-hero indie fringe, Bemis shines a light on a character all too many of us have seen, loved and lived with, sometimes inside our own skin. It’s a serious story about living with mental illness, and the difficulties in maintaining a life that’s predicated on prescriptions. It’s also the beginnings of an interesting adventure tale with an ironic twist. Coelho’s artwork looks like a more serious take on Rob Guillory style familiar to fans of Chew, and it’s appropriate for a book with a touch of snark but some honest angst in it as well. This 4 issue miniseries is not to be missed. Continue reading →

It’s been another week of ups and downs for new stories in comics, and We’re No. 1! is here to let you know which issues are worth picking up, and which are just good for fish wrap.

As far as new stories go, there was really only one true #1 this week. Once again Image brings cutting edge stuff with East of West #1, from Jonathon Hickman and Nick Dragotta (FF). This is an odd dystopian, sci-fi adventure, set on an Earth where time has taken an abrupt left-turn. Here, the Civil War never ended, and neither did the American-Indian Wars. This leaves a nation of indigenous American peoples on the U.S. western border and an angry, rebellious state to its south, along with a still independent Texas and a French kingdom in Louisiana, among other continental factions. Fast forward to a modern era of jet-powered electronic horses and an Old-West meets the Matrix level of futuristic marvels. We see one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Death, ride into town from out of the scorched prairie, bringing the President of (what’s left of) the United States a rather final reckoning. Where are his three companions you might ask? Well, they seem to have been reborn as childre, and are hunting their wayward brother across this savage landscape, with little regard for the innocents caught in their wake. This book is hyper-violent, though mostly off the page, and reminiscent of a lot of imagery we’ve seen before. Death himself is haunted by the demons and memories of his own past, a gathering of men who once tried to kill him, which is a convention common in westerns like High Plains Drifter. In fact, this modernized western leaves no trope unturned, and even has some of the surreal feel of the Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood film. The artwork lends itself well to this unique shoot-’em-up, most notably the jarring and dramatic coloring of Death and his companions in black and white, while the rest of the comic is in stark color. East of West is a solid read, and a good-looking one for certain, but not original enough to follow for long. The addition of the sci-fi element isn’t enough to make its premise fresh for very long, and the book leans too heavily on its influences before the first issue is finished. Continue reading →

Miss me? Well, I’m back with a whole slew of new #1s, from brand new tales to reboots, as well as a smattering of the stuff from last week.

Image Comics’ Five Ghosts: The Haunting of Fabian Gray is a rather complicated tale about an Indiana Jones-style “treasure hunter” Fabian Gray, who has somehow stumbled upon the restless souls of five iconic literary figures, Dracula, Robin Hood and Sherlock Holmes among them. Now possessed of their powers, as well as those of an unnamed wizard and samurai, he and his ghosts adventure about the globe. Exactly what he’s attempting to achieve is a bit murky, for a host of reasons. First off, this really doesn’t seem like the beginning of this story, though if there are previously published Fabian Gray tales, I couldn’t find them. The writer, Frank J. Barbiere, has done some work for the collective series Dark Horse Presents, but it’s unlikely that another company published Fabian’s early exploits. To top it off, the art by Chirs Mooneyham is, pardon the pun, sketchy. Faces are indistinct, backgrounds are largely just colors used to represent mood, and while the book looks great, its look doesn’t necessarily feed the narrative, and certainly not one that feels like we were dropped into it in mid-story. I hope I can find the earlier bits of this tale, as I was certainly intrigued by the concept, if a touch confused. Continue reading →