Tagged: Andrew Wheeler

Review: ‘MuZz, Vol. 1’ by FSc

Review: ‘MuZz, Vol. 1’ by FSc

MuZz, Vol. 1
By FSc (Foo Swee Chin)
SLG Publishing, May 2008, $14.95

There’s a train that runs to MuZz – or, at least, it’s supposed to – carrying ideas and thoughts whose creators have lost interest in them. They’re all pretty odd and motley, as you might expect: a black whale, a phantom cat, and things I couldn’t even begin to describe.

But, on this particular train, there’s also a figure that looks like a teenage girl missing an eye. She’s Modorelin Farllee, she’s an actual human, and she’s not even dead. (Well, I don’t think she’s dead, but I don’t want to be too definite about any plot points concerning [[[MuZz]]].)

Farllee remembers nothing of her past, and wakes up on the train in such a frantic, grouchy mood that she shakes her elf guide to death and has to rely on the standard pamphlet and the advice of her fellow passengers to figure out what’s going on.

And so she quickly learns what I’ve just told you – she doesn’t believe that she’s actually a figment of someone else’s imagination, but she can’t prove that, and drops the subject. None of them are precisely sure what will happen to them in MuZz, but, for nearly all of them, it has to be better than their previous lives.

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ComicMix Columns/Features for the Week Ending June 22, 2008

ComicMix Columns/Features for the Week Ending June 22, 2008

  • News
  • June 22, 2008

You know the recent dire rumors floating about in the comics industry are heating up when they’ve made it to Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily blog, alongside a huge photo of Dan DiDio.  DHD was an indispensable resource during the recent writers’ strike; let’s see how Finke helps raise the profile of the funnybook business, for better or worse.  Meanwhile, our columnists and feature writers will keep bringing you what we do best!  Here’s what we have for you from this past week:

Stay tuned for more news and views!

Manga Friday: Three Books from CMX

Manga Friday: Three Books from CMX

  • News
  • June 20, 2008

Just last week, a secret package of photocopied pages, marked "CONFIDENTIAL — DO NOT REPRODUCE" landed on my desk. Included were three books from DC’s newish manga imprint, CMX, from across the range of their titles. And so, through great personal travail — and with the assistance of someone at DC who must remain nameless, since there was no cover letter — here are the first ComicMix reviews of CMX books…

(Exciting, isn’t it?)

These are all forthcoming books, hitting stores starting in late September. So you can think of this review as a teaser, if you want.

Variante, Vol. 1

by Igura Sugimoto

DC Comics/CMX, October 2008, $12.99

This is the fourth and final volume of this Mature-readers series, so I’m going to be doing a bit of guessing about the beginnings that led to this ending. There’s a young woman named Aiko who’s being held prisoner by the requisite nasty corporation, Atheos. The head of Atheos is completely insane, and wants to turn Aiko into a goddess who will destroy the entire human race and create a new world just for him.

This is a not-impossible dream, since Aiko is a "second-generation chimera," a human with some sort of ill-defined powers — she seems to spead out her own flesh into shields and weapons, or maybe that’s supposed to be energy — who is also the daughter of people who also secretly had those powers. Also, Atheos has been involved, somehow, in turning people into chimera, which is nasty and unpleasant, even leaving aside the fact that chimera tend to go crazy and kill lots of people.

There are other bad guys — as usual, there are factions and intrigue within Atheos, and someone on the good guy’s side turns out to have worked for them long ago, before he turned good.

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Review: In Odd We Trust by Dean Koontz & Queenie Chan

Review: In Odd We Trust by Dean Koontz & Queenie Chan

In Odd We Trust
Created by Dean Koontz; Written by Queenie Chan & Dean Koontz; Illustrations by Queenie Chan
Del Rey, July 2008, $10.95

Odd Thomas, in a series of (so far) four novels from Dean Koontz, is a twenty-year-old fry cook in the small desert town of Pico Mundo, California. He has a tough girlfriend – Stormy Llewellyn, orphan and gun-slinging amateur detective – a great way with pancakes, many friends in town, and a secret: he can see the dead. The dead never talk, but they do find ways to communicate with Odd, and to get him to help them.

[[[In Odd We Trust]]] takes place when Odd is nineteen; it’s a prequel to the novels. Very early on, in a scene reminiscent of the great amateur “consulting detectives” stretching back to Sherlock, the local police chief, Wyatt Porter, comes to ask Odd for help. Joey Gordon, a seven-year-old, was killed brutally in a home invasion during the fifteen minutes between being dropped off after school by a neighbor and the arrival of his housekeeper/nanny. The killer left a cryptic note, made up of letters cut out of magazines, but no normal clues.

The police are baffled, as they so often are in stories like this. Sometimes I think the police exist in fiction merely to be baffled while the much smarter and more skilled amateurs do their legwork for them, and then sweep in at the end to do the actual arresting.

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ComicMix Columns/Features for the Week Ending June 15, 2008

ComicMix Columns/Features for the Week Ending June 15, 2008

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  • June 15, 2008

This week we’ve brought you a man-sized portion of columns and features by our intrepid band:

Strong enough for a man, but made for — well, everybody!

Manga Friday: Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting

Manga Friday: Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting

  • News
  • June 13, 2008

This week it’s time to go back to what manga do best – or one of the things manga do best, anyway – stories about people fighting and killing each other, usually with long point bits of metal. To make it even more interesting, all three of the books I’m looking at this week are later books in series – and I’ve only seen the earlier books in one case. So this might just turn into another installment of Stump the Reviewer…

Freak: Legend of the Nonblonds, Vol. 3
Story by Yi DongEun; Art by Yu Chung
Yen Press, June 2008, $10.99

Three people –the increasingly oddly named Verna, Lorel, and Tublerun – live together (I think) and are the “Nonblonds,” a troupe of fighter/bounty hunter/martial artists, which apparently is a legitimate career in this world. (And that’s not unusual for manga, actually.)

None of them are blonde – which I wouldn’t have been sure about if Tublerun wasn’t the guy on the cover, but leave that aside – but I have no idea why that matters. Oh, and Verna – a dark-skinned woman, when the other two are light-skinned men – has been spending too much time in “Cerebro” lately, to make more money for someone who’s been in a coma for fifteen years.

Anyway, in this book, Tublerun – who I think was previously the goofball of the group, or perhaps even the explicit comedy relief, takes a solo job up near the North Pole. There, a girl named Marti, who calls herself the personal secretary of President Magnus and says the quest is an unofficial GIA event, tells an assembled group of tough characters that they are going to go into “an ancient site where the method of liquid metal-making was created” to find and retrieve a capsule for a vast reward.

With her is a guy who is, in order, Mr. Ecliptor, GIA’s security chief, and the son of “our President.” (He’s also, once he puts on a mask, the powerful and deadly Chroma – this may be a secret identity.)

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ComicMix Columns/Features for the Week Ending June 8, 2008

ComicMix Columns/Features for the Week Ending June 8, 2008

Greetings from the MoCCA Art Fest, where ComicMix will be out in force today!  We’re probably having the time of our lives, having prepared this roundup well beforehand.  Good thing, too, as we keep adding more new features!  Here’s the scoop on what our columnists and feature-ists have brought you this past week:

Back to the fun at the Puck Building!  Or is that the pun at the F– no wait, that can’t be right…

Manga Friday: Korean Road Trip!

Manga Friday: Korean Road Trip!

The two books this week are actually manwha rather than manga, since they come from Korea and not Japan. Other than the reading direction, both of these books are more similar to their Japanese counterparts than to American comics, which I will demonstrate, viz:

Croquis Pop, Vol. 1
Story by KwangHyun Seo; Art by JinHo Ko
Yen Press, June 2008, $10.99

Da-Il is a young man who either wants to be a manwha artist more than anything in the world — because he told his now-dead mother that the only thing he wanted to do with his life was to make pictures that made her happy — or he fell into the job as a high school student because making comics "looked like fun." Or maybe both, since the story tells us both things and gives us no reason to disbelieve either of them.

Da-Il has just come to work for the manwha-ga Ho Go, who has just moved into a big house with his two other assistants, the punctilious senior assistant Ho-Suk Yang and the gorgeous and mysterious Hang-Chu. (Either in Korea in general, or just in this kind of manwha story, the staff of a particular story live with their boss.) But the hiring procedures are a bit lax, since Da-Il can barely draw.

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Review: Two Grendel Hardcovers – Devil Child & Devil Quest

Review: Two Grendel Hardcovers – Devil Child & Devil Quest

It’s generally not a good sign when a series turns from telling stories at the far end of its timeline to filling in the gaps in earlier stories and explaining all the backstory — do I need to mention George Lucas here? — so these two new collections filled me with some trepidation. They’re both reprints of older material — older even than I thought, from 1999 and 1994-95 — but were explicitly returns to even earlier stories.

Matt Wagner’s series of [[[Grendel]]] stories started in 1982, and the main sequence ran from 1986 through 1992 (with a gap near the end caused by the collapse of Wagner’s then-publisher Comico). They started as the story of a near-future crimelord named Hunter Rose who used a mask and electrified pitchfork to terrorize…well, everyone, really. After Wagner wrote the story of Hunter’s inevitable demise, he rethought “Grendel” as a force of evil and aggression that possessed various people through a long future history. With various collaborators (and a number of stories entirely by other hands) and a great diversity of storytelling styles, the Grendel stories all had something in common: a deep, central notion that people are full of evil and corruption, and that life is inevitably nasty, brutish, and short.

Grendel: Devil Child
By Diana Schutz, Tim Sale, and Teddy Kristiansen
Dark Horse, May 2008, $17.95

Stacy Palumbo was the (adopted) daughter of the first Grendel, Hunter Rose, and the mother of the second, Christine Spar. She was a serious but lovable girl in Hunter’s story, and dead by the time of Christine’s. Her unpleasant life in between was backstory in the Christine Spar stories, but here it’s dramatized to wring maximum pathos.

(Think “maximum pathos” is too much? Try this line from the back cover of [[[Devil Child]]] — “The ugly world has no shelter for frightened Stacy, the pivotal link in a chain of evil that extends to the limits of time.” The limits of time, huh? Okay, if you say so.)

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Review: Out of Picture, Vol. 2

Review: Out of Picture, Vol. 2

Out of Picture, Vol. 2
no editor credited
Villard Books, June 2008, $tk

No one will admit to editing [[[Out of Picture 2]]], though they seem to be proud of it – buried deep on the copyright page is the “produced by” credit I’ve pulled out for the bibliographic information above, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those were the editors. Ah, well – someone was in charge of this book, even if we’re not sure who that was.

Out of Picture 2 is the second book from a group of animators and illustrators connected to Blue Sky Studios – the first Out of Picture was published by a French house, caused a stir at some conventions, and was reprinted by Villard in December. (And I reviewed it then.) Basically the same crew is back for this volume, though they don’t all work at Blue Sky anymore.

And I see, looking back at my review of Out of Picture 1, that it was a gorgeous book, but a bit lacking in the story department – somewhat obvious and clichéd. I’m sorry to say that Out of Picture 2 is the same kind of thing – amazing art, reproduced fantastically well on large pages of nice paper…but telling stories that aren’t all that special.

This time, we open with Jason Sadler’s wordless “[[[Sub Plotter]]],” a cute little story about the effects of sneezing on a gigantic war-map of an ocean. It seems to be set during WWII, and it’s quite visually inventive, using the space of the large pages very well and popping up with more insets than I would have thought possible. But the story told is a silly little vignette, and, even more so, it’s a vignette that would probably be better animated than in its current form.

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