“Snowboarding is an activity that is very popular with people who do not feel that regular skiing is lethal enough.... I now realize that the small hills you see on ski slopes are formed around the bodies of forty-seven-year-olds who tried to learn snowboarding.” 

    ~Dave Barry

Okay!  Let’s get straight to the reviews!

Super Real

Vs. The Movie Industry

Created, Written, and Directed by Jason Martin

Illustrated by any number of his friends

Letters by J. Mathew Crawley

Published by SuperRealGraphics.Com, 48 pages for $4.99

I have a confession to make: I was prepared to dislike this book.  Really, I wanted to HATE it.

I read it when I was in a bad mood.  I wanted nothing to do with comics.  In fact, I wanted nothing to do with anything.  I felt frazzled and, not for the first time, resented the necessity of reading something for the express purpose of reviewing it.  That probably doesn’t sound good, but an amazing number of review copies will occasionally find their way through my door, and you’d be surprised how many of them are for properties that don’t interest me at all and ultimately leave me scratching my head—or worse.  I won’t even review the really bad ones, unless they’re really, REALLY bad, in which case, I usually will review them out of sheer spite, but I still have to READ everything.  And it’s not like I don’t have anything better to do with my time.

So anyway, there I was, with my copy of Super Real vs. The Movie Industry in hand, bracing for the worst.  Inane teenage banter?  Check.  Gratuitously huge boobs?  Check again.  Ridiculously obscure art-house movie references?  BIG TIME CHECK.  All the blood, guts, gore, and general wackiness and mayhem that you could ask for?  Uh, yeah, that’d be a big time check, too.  Heh.  Pretty soon I was chuckling right along with these guys, and honestly, by the time I’d gotten halfway through book, I was just, well, laughing my ass off.

I looked up, and suddenly my bad day was over.  Thanks Super Real Graphics! 

Seriously, this is a great book!  Easily the best in the series so far.  Go pick it up, especially if you’re having a bad day.

 

Robotika

For A Few Rubles More #1

Story, Art, and Lettering by Alex Sheikman

Story Editing and Script by David Moran

Color Art by Joel Chua

Published by ASP, 32 pages (full color, no ads) for $3.99

Alex Sheikman’s four issue mini series Robotika was one of the most interesting and potential-filled works of 2006.  Launched at about the same time as Mouse Guard, it helped set the standard for what ASP was—a true artist’s studio featuring off-beat stories with a strong fantasy influence and fantastic art.  And the critics noticed.  I think EVERY critic commented on Alex’s abilities as an artist, with the praise going from “the art is very good” to “this guy would be the next big thing if he was working at Marvel or DC.”  Unfortunately, fewer critics liked the storytelling.  For example, I myself thought the first story was confusingly told, especially in Issue 2, despite the fact that I liked the  overall subject-matter.  And then there was that wacky-ass sideways lettering... 

Fortunately for us, Alex was listening to his critics.  It’s not often that you find a skilled professional artist who’s willing to accept constructive criticism and then go back to the drawing board to make his work—and, indeed, his entire process—better, but that is what has happened here, with the result that the new Robotika is not only better than the old one, it’s actually FANTASTIC! 

The story here is a basic western.  The Three Yojimbos stumble into a town in the middle of nowhere, just in time to see a deal gone wrong.  And hilarity ensues.  But it works, and works well, because of the way it’s executed.  The new series retains all of what made the old one uniquely “Robtika”—and there’s a lot of that here, stylistically—while finding (with the help of writer David Moran) a new sense of both clarity and theme.  With that in place, suddenly this series lives up to its potential.  And yeah, I dug this book as much as anything I’ve read in the past year.  Honestly, it’s so much better than that same old tired-ass crap that most of the bigger companies are serving up these days that it shouldn’t even be sold in the same places.  Really, it’s that good and then some.  It’s well-illustrated, weird as Hell, and not at all self-conscious or serious about it.  And it’s got samurai in cowboy hats.  What else can you ask for?

I have no idea if Robotika will go on to be the next big thing, but it certainly deserves its shot.  It’s amazingly good original sci fi, and as we’ve said here before, that’s something that’s in short supply in today’s marketplace.  I hope retailers will give this new series a go.  And if you see this out in your local shop, try it.  It’s well worth your time, I assure you.

 

Rogue Angel

Teller of Tall Tales #1

Written by Barbara Kesel

Art by Renae De Liz

Colors by Ray Dillon

Letters and Design by Neil Uyetake

Edits by Tom Waltz

Published by IDW, 32 pages for $3.99

Rogue Angel: Teller of Tall Tales is easily the best thing I’ve ever seen from IDW.  I mean, yeah, I liked both Zipper and Children of the Grave a lot, but this is better, both because in storytelling terms it covers more ground more quickly and because, well, the art is just tremendously strong stuff.  I’m sorry Tom, but it really is.  I mean, I don’t know that the subject matter here is gonna be down the alley of my regular readers—I think most of those sick bastards tend to go in for the “big guns, big boobs” theory of storytelling—but from a pure comics, pure execution standpoint, Teller of Tall Tales #1 is as good as anything I’ve reviewed here in a long, long time.  Retailers, you guys ought to order this series by the metric ton.

Rogue Angel is based on a long-running series of novels but this issue is the property’s first comic.  It’s a kind of a Laura Croft-meets-Norse mythology story, where our intrepid heroine saves ancient artifacts using a magic sword straight out of the Halls of Valhalla.  And I gotta say that I wasn’t real surprised to learn that the series is based on a bunch of books given that we never find out exactly how our heroine got her sword in the first place, which is nice because, truth to tell, that’s completely irrelevant to the story.  What we learn instead is that Mark Twain apparently used to live in an old, wild-west silver mining town and that he may or may not have gotten some of the story ideas for Huck Finn from a from the free black man who owned his favorite watering hole.  We then learn—quickly—that there are some people out there who are willing to kill to keep this whole thing secret.

Barbara Kesel was definitely the right writer for this story.  I say that because although I’m sure there are plenty of guys who will dig a story about a busty ass-kicking archeologist, Rogue Angel comes across with a lot more girl-power than T&A.  Also, although Rogue Angel is totally different than my other favorite Kesel work, CrossGen’s old Meridian series, it has much the same tone. You can read it to your kids, even your daughters, without fear of scarring them for life or making them think that it’s okay to dress like a whore.  That’s a good thing.  What makes it work is the art, which is bouncy but not at all gratuitous.  It’s also exciting and dynamic; De Liz gets in your face at all the right times.  The package as a whole is both intriguing and exciting, and I expect it’ll be pretty damn successful in the marketplace because of it.

Like I said, Rogue Angel: Teller of Tall Tales is a winner.  I expect you’ll see it everywhere.  And if what you want is an exciting, uplifting book, well, this is it.  Buy it, read it with your kids, and enjoy.

 

Stray Voltage

Ugh.  I’d planned to do five or six short reviews and instead wound up doing three of damn-near full-length.  This is why I can never get caught up.

*sigh*

Just a couple of quick notes before we wrap it up:

My wife and I went skiing last weekend, and it was twice as awesome as I thought it was going to be, and I’d already thought it was gonna be pretty damned awesome.  Here’s a shot of me and my wife Sally at the top of the mountain at Ski Butternut.

 

And here’s a shot of our daughter Hannah, 4, on skis for the first time ever.

 

I’m not so sure that’s a happy face there.

 

If you haven’t heard by now, Republican Fred Thompson dropped out of the Presidential race over the weekend following his third-place finish in the South Carolina primary.  This is only important because it isn’t.  That is to say that the nomination was Thompson’s to lose for months and months, but having watched his campaign, I have to seriously wonder if he actually wanted to win at all.  Thompson is a pretty good actor who nevertheless came across dead in most of his debates and stump speeches.  That gives some credence to the rumor that Thompson was only really running for President because a) a bunch of Republican Party muckity-mucks asked him to, and b) it got his wife all hot and bothered.

We know that Fred Thompson is and always has been an A-Number One pussy-getter.  Personally, I think that’s all his run for the Presidency was to him—a way to get more pussy.  I suppose we could be disappointed by that, but I don’t get the feeling that Thompson is, so why bother?

 

Eli Manning is my new hero.  And I no longer believe ANYTHING I hear out of the San Diego Chargers.

 

Finally, I promised my friend Alan Evans that I’d plug his webcomic Rival Angels this week, so here goes: 

Rival Angels is a behind-the-scenes look at a fictional women’s professional wrestling league a la the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW).  It’s written as a sort of Rocky with hot chicks, but it takes a decidedly more T&A tack and is perhaps a bit lower brow because of it.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Alan got started on this particular subject matter while doing art for some of the various (nefarious?) girl-fight webcomics out there but ultimately got tired of their approach.  Rival Angels is his attempt to add story and characterization to what is a surprisingly well-established fetish sub-genre of webcomics.  Yes, he has plenty of busty babes duking it out (and maybe occasionally getting it on as well), but he’s also got real characters with real motivations.  If that sounds like it could potentially be your thing, then check it out.

Personally, I find the whole thing kind of fascinating.

I should also mention that Alan’s tentatively asked me to write a short story for Rival Angels at some point in the future.  I’ve no idea when that’s coming, but I’m definitely going to do it.  I’ll let you know when I do.

 

And that’s about all I got.  Until next week, stay safe and have a great weekend!

***

Dan Head is a utilities analyst and freelance writer.  You can learn more about him and his work on his ComicSpace Page or by visiting his hosted forum at AwesomeStormJustice.com.  His graphic novel Bronx Angel: Politics By Another Method is now available at WOWIO.com.

To get your comic reviewed here, email Dan at dan@paperbackreader.com.