skull king

Last week, I talked about the first three issues of Skull The Slayer by Marv Wolfman and Steve Gan about a Vietnam vet and three civilians transported, via the Bermuda Triangle, to a distant past jammed with brutal cavemen, dead aliens, and many, many rampaging dinosaurs of semi-sketchy verisimilitude.  After trying to ramp up the mystery and the spectacle with the appearance of a Time Tower, wherein all of Earth’s historical epochs are stacked atop one another like remarkably pictaresque hatboxes, Gan abandons the book to work on Conan, Wolfman abandons writing chores to take on larger editorial responsibilities at Marvel, and a new creative force enters the scene: the writer known as…Englehart.

Join me after the jump, as I look at his arrival, his aftermath, and the rest of the nasty, brutish and short run of Skull The Slayer.

Continue reading

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

If you show me a new-to-me book by most comic book writers, I can roughly guess how I’ll feel about it before I ever crack the covers. Peter David on a mainstream super-hero book? I’ll think it’s breezy, largely forgettable entertainment. Garth Ennis on a slapstick buddy comedy? I will walk away slightly disappointed and, oddly, mildly hurt. Christopher Priest on anything? I will love it, and be mildly annoyed that there isn’t more of it. Joe Casey on a creator-owned superhero-adjacent book? I will be left completely cold and kind of hate myself for the whole thing. And so on and so on and so on.

I mean, this is not news. This is why we all have favorite writers/artists/sculptors/pianists/etc.

But it’s worth mentioning because Rick Remender TOTALLY baffles me every time. He’s written stuff that I love, and he’s written stuff that I couldn’t finish, and I haven’t yet figured out what’s going to go which way.  So I got to have the exciting experience of coming to the new collection of The Last Days of American Crime with no idea whatsoever how I’d react.

LastDaysBulletInTheHead

Continue reading

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

I have, thanks to the local library, recently been doing a deep dive on the somewhat-forgotten series of The New 52. Who read Team 7? Me! Who raced through all 19 issues of Demon Knights? That would also be me! Who found himself utterly confounded by the 30 issue run of Stormwatch? Just guess. Continue reading

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Skull main

If there was ever a time to write about Skull The Slayer, the time is probably now.  Yes, that’s right.  Forty years after the debut of the character’s short-lived Marvel series? That’s when we need to sit down and talk about a little known fourth-rate character dearly loved by a select few (in part because he’s little known and fourth-rate).

The time is now to talk because the character has sort of/kind of returned in the third issue of Jason Aaron and Mike Del Mundo’s Weirdworld, which means Marvel released a ridiculously expensive trade paperback collecting what you could call the entire arc of the character—all eight issues of his series, and a two issue wrap-up in Marvel Two In One a few years later—which also means digital versions of both the collection and the individual issues hit Comixology.

(Which also means I bought them as soon as I figured that out.)

[And pro-tip: if you have access to the Kindle app or the full-color Kindle tablets, you can get the Kindle version of the trade for $9.99…which is a dollar an issue and half the price I spent.  Normally, I’m leery about recommending the Kindle app because I learned the hard way it’s not great with double page spreads, but there’s literally one of those in the entire ten issues. ]

Anyway! Yes, there truly has never been a better time to talk about a little known fourth-rate Marvel character…except maybe ten years from now, when Marvel turns the character into a startlingly successful motion picture franchise.  Until that happens, however, join me after the the jump for the first part of the preamble to that discussion, won’t you?

Continue reading

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Sinestro14

Since my very first post here on Wait, What?, I’ve been holding up the Green Lantern family of books as an example of … maybe not the worst of the DCYou initiative, per se, but certainly the most dull. (In fact, I was dismissive enough in that first post that I openly tried to make up for it with a capsule review of Green Lantern: Lost Army in my second — a noble effort that failed miserably when I was left bored and cold by GL:LA.)

But Sinestro #14 happened to be sitting on the top of a pile while I was trying (and, as ever, failing) to relax earlier, the only book in easy reach, so I read it for lack of anything better to do … and it’s the first recent Green Lantern family book that has made me want to come back for more.

Continue reading

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Screen Shot 2015-08-25 at 7.46.03 AM

Chalk it up to professional curiosity, reader masochism or somewhere in between, but this weekend I found myself reading Inhuman #1-11 — which is to say, everything available on Marvel Unlimited — to try and see what they fuss was about when it comes to the Inhumans, and more importantly, whether there’s enough in there to justify the output that Marvel is demanding of the concept, once All New, All Different Marvel launches. (For those unaware, Inhumans will be replaced by two different series: Uncanny Inhumans, All-New Inhumans, with an additional Karnak spin-off coming, while Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur will co-star an Inhuman, Ms. Marvel will continue to dip into Inhumans mythology as needs be and Uncanny Avengers adds “Inhumans” to its attempt to build bridges between mutants and humans.) Continue reading

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail
untitled-2-1309279310

                                 Strong Female Characters, by the mighty Kate Beaton

It is almost the end of August.  IT IS ALMOST THE END OF AUGUST.  Sorry, but my brain is broken just a little bit by that fact.
But hey!  After the jump, why don’t you check out the show notes for Episode 183 of Wait, What? It’s a two-plus hour episode where Graeme McMillan and I answer questions posed to us by those wonderful people on Patreon who help keep us afloat.  (I’m not sure what that term means for Graeme, but for me “afloat” means, “oh god, Comixology has the entire run of Super-Villain Team-Up for $1.99 an issue, and some of those are by Englehart, hope I can hold out for the first of the month…”)
Join us, won’t you?

Continue reading

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail
Other Sonja

Not my preferred issue to buy, but I don’t want to run the same image at the top of a post twice so…

From The Dept. of “Act Now”:  I can’t tell you how surprised and immensely pleased I am that only two weeks after I sung the praises of Frank Thorne’s Red Sonja comics, Dynamite put them up on sale over at Comixology.  You’ll have to act fast to catch them—this post goes live on August 22 and the sale ends on the evening of August 24—but even if you don’t want to pick up the first collected volume (which is on sale for two dollars less than the sale price I paid for it, the sad man said sadly), you can snag individual issues for ninety-nine cents.  I guess I’d recommend issue The Adventures of Red Sonja #6 (a.k.a. Marvel Feature #6), since it’s got Thomas back on the scripting and features some of the art sequences I excerpted?  But honestly, I snagged the remaining two collected volumes before I even thought to post this.

That out of the way, let’s get down to the book reviewing, eh?  And for a change, these are new books! (Ish.) From Marvel!

Continue reading

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

SWLuke

I’ve noticed something odd recently: I no longer care about the recency of the comics I’m reading, or reading about — or reviewing, for that matter. Once upon a time, I thought reviews that went up Sunday for books that had come out the Wednesday prior felt stale and useless. Now, a smart and entertaining bit of comics reviewing and/or criticism feels like a smart and entertaining bit of reviewing and/or criticism, regardless of if the book is a day old, a month old, or half a decade old.

I think a lot of factors have contributed to this shift. Some, like being a so-called grown-up and the associated responsibilities and timesucks, are obvious. (I never thought my college Wednesday afternoons, reading new issues of Preacher and Stormwatch in a bar or divey Chinese restaurant, would become quite such objects of personal nostalgia.)

But then there’s other, external factors. Like the way digital comics remove the risk of a comic being hard to find after its first week of sales. Or the way Marvel Unlimited has basically timeshifted most of my Marvel reading by 6 months.  Or the way that Marvel has, y’know, totally disrupted the continuity and flow of their books by ending the universe and telling like 800,000 What If stories. Or the way that the library has made single issues and collections unexpectedly available at times of their choosing, not mine. Or the way sales on Comixology will suddenly bring a whole host of new books into my life.

All of these things have made me much less concerned with only reviewing books that came out in the last 20 seconds; hopefully you all feel similarly. Because if not, it’s going to be really jarring when you see that, like, half the capsules below are from earlier than Wednesday — starting with last week’s All-Star Section Eight #3 after the jump.

Continue reading

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail