Welcome back everyone to this week’s look at new stories and voices in comics. After a stellar week last time out, can this round of new No. 1 issues from some of comics best and brightest hold up? There’s a very simple and straightforward answer to that question.
No. Brace yourself.
As anger washes over me, I’ll try to quickly get through the first two #1’s from Zenescope comics (which I can’t help but feel is being spelled incorrectly). Zenoscope is, from my limited experience, a big part of what is wrong with representing women in comics these days. This stuff is practically porn, and only barely attempts to disguise itself as anything more. Zenescope seems to have built its brand on the nearly naked spandex clad super heroine and gratuitous versions of various fairy tale heroes. Their first new offering this month is a spin-off from their Grimm Fairy Tales series, GFT Bad Girls #1. Following the exploits of what we have to assume is the heroine from that series, it attempts to combine all the best villains from various storylines into one super-group of (apparently) evil-she-slut-strippers-from-Hell. Seriously, they actually do seem to come from Hell, and spend most of the series lounging around like they are posing for Playboy while sending evil beasts of some sort through an inter-dimensional portal to destroy the heroine. (A heroine whose name the writers never seem to get around to disclosing. I guess we were supposed to read the other books). The heroine, by the way, is in prison, and seems to be enjoying it. She also directly expresses her sadness that the hell monsters are EATING the other female inmates, then shrugs it off with a sort of “Oh well, they ARE all crooks” sort of casual aplomb that’s pretty appalling.
Zenescope’s second new offering this week is even worse, as impossible as that sounds. Irresistible #1 is the story of Allan Keeg, a sad sack whose girlfriend dumped him for undisclosed reasons 18 months prior. Allen, while on a night out with his friends at a strip club, spends a great deal of time telling us all about how he understands the inner workings of the soul of the strippers around him, that he knows they are manipulating him, and that he feels sorry for them, all the while depicting them as money-grubbing harlots who mirror the pain his ex has caused him. He leaves the club in drunken disgust, only to come across an old woman being attacked by thugs in an alley. He gets himself beaten up pretty badly trying to help her, and when he wakes up (having in fact not done a damn thing to the thugs besides give them a new punching bag) the old woman, who is (of course) actually a beautiful gypsy princess of some type in a magical disguise, grants Allan the “super power” (I started to actually write the words “finger quotes” here, get my meaning?) of being IRRESISTABLE TO WOMEN. Allan promptly uses this power, of which he is blissfully unaware at first, to have sex in the bathroom of his local coffee shop with the barista (who is drawn in true Hollywood form as though she’s a fashion model in real life, and only slings lattes on the side). He seems quite proud of his latest achievement, and we’re led to believe the book is about him overcoming his new found gift/curse, as apparently having every woman in the world wanting to have sex with you ISN’T AS GREAT AS IT SOUNDS?!?!?!?! Seriously, these Zenoscope guys are misogynistic douchebags, as far as I can tell, and I most certainly will NOT be coming back to this or any of their other titles. Also, the cover depicts a bored Allen surrounded by strippers, and inside they reveal that there was a limited run of this issue in which the cover art actually depicted them naked. Gross.
It doesn’t get much better from there, but at least it’s not offensive. Debris #1 (of 4) from Image, written by Kurtis J. Wiebe (Peter Panzerfaust) with art by Riley Rossmo (of the excellent graphic novel Wild Children). Set in a dystopian future full of, well, garbage, Debris is the story of the warrior woman Maya who has recently become the Protector of the last human settlement on the planet. They live in a world in which magical spirits with vaguely pre-historic animal forms have (there’s no good way to say this without making it funny) inhabited the garbage. She hunts large, walking, predatory mech-ostriches, which are in turn hunted by what appears to be a cast of T-Rex, from the 80’s era Transformers animated show. The art here is sketchy at best, making such a grand concept a bit tough to swallow. In fact, the coloring and backgrounds are extremely washed out, often even blank, as though Rossmo is attempting to show us the starkness of life in future-garbage-world, reminding us of what it might be like to live in the middle of Road Warrior if the wrecked cars all turned into lions and tried to eat you. Maya is a sadly unrealized character, with little driving force to her personality beyond replacing her mentor as Protector of the last tribe of humans. She seems to have no true personal connections to anyone, though she does conveniently seem to be the only person who knows about, ever mentions, or believes in a legend about a fabled water supply lost eons ago. This is an issue that’s a long set-up for a loner-on-a-quest type series, romping about in the ravaged world, and while it might be an environmental metaphor, it fails pretty quickly.
The only real bright spot of this week’s new offerings was Eternity #1, from the National Comics imprint of DC Comics. Eternity is the story of Christopher Freeman, a medical examiner for the police department in a bit of a post-life crisis, if you will. Christopher has had a near death experience, having been involved in a shooting that took the life of his father, a local police Detective. He survived the shooting after a brief experience in what seems to be a rather gooey Purgatory, and is becoming more and more isolated as he dreams of his father constantly blaming him. He has also developed a new little talent of being able to pop back into the slimy waiting room of death and bring back the ghosts of the recently deceased who come across his morgue table. The young hipster medical tech and his shade-ly companion then have a limited amount of time to solve the unfortunate corpse’s murder. It turns out, however, that there are rules to the game of reviving dead souls, as a mysterious man calling himself Mr. Keeper tells our young hero, and Christopher isn’t playing by them. In a rather goofy twist, it seems the first rule of Dead Soul Resurrection club is you don’t talk about … well, you get the picture. Anyway, Chris is now a sneaky detective in his own right with the proverbial supernatural-powers-that-be on his backside, and we’ll see where he takes it from here. Thankfully, the first issue showed at least a touch of sensibility, as there were no partially naked women, and our hero saved the bacon of a rape victim by being the one person who believed her and was willing to help. Granted, he had a leg up, but it was a nice twist as well as a nice thought.
There are a few other honorable mention #1’s this week too. For good ol’ mainstream comics fun, take a look at Marvel’s second go round of X-treme X-men, Vol.2, #1. This picks up Greg Pak’s previous mainstream X storyline about a group of cross-dimensional X-Men bouncing around reality trying to save it, stars the recycled X-man Dazzler (a fave in the gay community for years) and the floating head of alternate Professor X, and reads more like an issue #5 than a #1. Titan Comics has put out the fun little puck comic Everybody Loves Tank Girl #1, that’s just a greatest gas reel of everyone’s favorite post-punk-apocalyptic-feminist-with-a-big-ass-tank. And Dark Horse comics brought one of it’s web series to print with the oddly juvenile and unusually funny Axe Cop: President of the World #1. Have fun reading, folks. Until next week!
