Reading Comics #113 "Free Comic Book Day, Part 2"

By Saturday evening I'd lost my opportunity to experience Free Comic Book Day in its purest form, and yet the hangover proved perhaps more interesting than the regularly-scheduled celebration.  I've previously discussed my visit to Muse Comics in Colorado Springs on the day itself.  Now we'll talk about Sunday.

There are a surprising number of comic book stores in Colorado Springs.  As of this year there are even two shops for Escape Velocity, formerly known as Bargain Comics, which should be considered the godfather of them all.  There's also Heroes & Dragons, which was my entry point in the city when I moved here in 2007.  Ed's Cards and Comics is the third of these, rounding out the shops carrying new releases on a regular basis.  Yesterday I didn't go to any of these.  Instead I felt like making a trip to CK Comics in Manitou Springs, just to visit it for the first time.

After some initial scouring I wasn't terribly impressed.  It seemed like much more of a comics novelty shop than anything, and doesn't even overtly display new releases.  Yet it had been advertised by the FCBD site as participating in the event.  I already knew that Heroes & Dragons doesn't participate.  Escape Velocity is usually good to have some extra copies after the day itself, but doubtfully the main ones.  So CK it was...hopefully.  I looked and I looked.  Eventually I found one of those comic book boxes on the floor, and it contains oodles of FCBD comics.  Not all of them, but at this point I'm far more of a beggar than a chooser, right?

Still, this was a bountiful offering.  Here's what I got and what I thought of them:

Bongo Free-for-All (Bongo)
This publisher almost exclusively deals with Simpsons comics (with Futurama tossed in every now and again).  I've read some of it, strictly on a sporadic basis.  I love the cartoon, have for years (but mostly must abstain from the ever-persistent is-it-worse-than-before? debate as I don't get to watch on a regular basis these days, although every time I've watched new episodes I've still been amused), and the comics do a good job of capturing its spirit in a different format.  The characters do in fact translate well even without their distinctive voices.  There are several stories in the issue.  The first involves Bart behaving atypically well, which itself isn't the apocalyptic development everyone takes t for, but merely the result of a bet he made with Milhouse, his best friend.  It's the lead and best story.  Another one features L'il Homer concerning his reluctance to take a bath and his father (known as Grampa or Abe) trying to tell him a cautionary tale that is welcomed much differently than intended.  The art takes subtle liberties from the Matt Groening archetypes, which is always nice to see.

Chakra the Invincible (Graphic India)
The most notable thing about this one is that it's the latest of the latter-day Stan Lee creations.  What's different about this one is that it's very much from the basic '60s archetype (I guess that's the word of the day) he established at Marvel, set in India.  I don't know if there's a wide American audience for this, but seems much more natural and capable of sustaining more than just a novelty act than just about anything he's done for years.  He's credited for concept and story, but he's not a writer.  The other thing of note is the "Invincible" subtitle.  Invincible is also a long-running Robert Kirkman series over at Image (a hundred issues and counting!), so it's a little funny to see this word (also frequently used in association with Iron Man) in use again.

Grimm #0 (Dynamite)
Dynamite is one of many smaller publishers that lives and breathes on licensed comics and established properties.  Grimm is also a TV series, one that seems to be amassing a cult audience that grows over time.  It's pretty clever, and this issue explains the whole concept, how the main character is a descendant of the famous brothers who helped codify fairy tales.  He alone is capable of seeing the true faces of the monsters who have integrated themselves into modern society.  The issue also includes a preview for the upcoming Damsels, which is a lot like what Bill Willingham has been doing in Vertigo's Fables, or the TV series Once Upon a Time, or even the cheesecakey comics of Zenescope.  The writers, Leah Moore and John Reppion, have been Dynamite's in-house literary classics/adaptation experts since their work with Alice in Wonderland and Dracula.  With the success of this spring's Oz the Great and Powerful in movie theaters, it may very well prove that fairy tale characters are due to succeed vampires and zombies as the new obsession.

Infinity (Marvel)
A preview for an upcoming event book, Infinity is also a canny bid to capitalize on the appearance of Thanos in the credits of last summer's blockbuster Avengers flick.  The company is making a concerted effort to shift its space-based properties to greater prominence, and this is a huge art of that.  The writer is Jonathan Hickman, who continues to try and elevate his name in the comics pantheon (Thanos was previously the baby of legend Jim Starlin).  The title is a nod to the classic Infinity Gauntlet (and its various sequels), which is also one of the odd bit of convergences between Marvel and DC, which bases a lot of its legacy on Crisis on Infinite Earths (and its various sequels).  Most of this preview with weird alien creatures and a mythology that only in its final pages points to Thanos, thereby making the whole thing exactly like Avengers.  (Marvel tends to repeat itself a lot.)  The artist is Jim Cheung, whom I still associate with the original Young Avengers.  He's got a playful yet serious style, which looks quite different in this altered context.  There's also a reprint of a vintage Thanos appearance.  For the record, Thanos has my vote as undisputed best Marvel villain.

KaBoom! Summer Blast! (Boom!)
KaBoom is the young readers imprint of Boom!, a company that at this point might as well admit that it has all but been driven into irrelevance by the licensed properties on display here.  Adventure Time is a crudely animated cartoon series that captures the spirit of the way children play (when they're playing something other than video games).  Amusingly (and confusingly), the story of Finn and Jake featured here takes the form of the classic Choose Your Own Adventure books.  There are a lot of crazy arrows directing how to read it, but it's almost as much fun (and appropriate) to read all of the possible directions at the same time.  There are a few other such segments (including one based on te Ice Age movies), and there are also ones based on Peanuts and Garfield, two classic comic strips.  Peanuts creator Charles Schulz has been dead for more than a decade, and newspapers have continued to rerun the old strips, plus the regular airing of the Christmas TV special, but it's good that these characters live on in new adventures.  Amusingly, this one is all about Charlie Brown teaching the reader how to draw Linus, all while obsessing over baseball.  In fact, he uses baseball images to guide the entire process!  It's good stuff.  If this special guides readers to any of the featured titles,  would think they would undoubtedly be Adventure Time and Peanuts, unless readers don't like imaginative storytelling.

Star Wars/Captain Midnight/Avatar: The Last Airbender (Dark Horse)
This one's a grab bag, too, features three different spotlights, two of which are featured on the flipbook format's covers (the first and last I've listed).  I'm mostly familiar with Last Airbender thanks to the M. Night Shyamalan movie (which I loved).  The story in this issue is a tad like the Phil Hester comic I talked about in Part 1 of this FCBD series.  The Captain Midnight episode, meanwhile, is part of the company's periodic effort to enter the superhero game, mostly using characters they tried in the '90s as well.  A lot of these smaller publishers seem to equate prior publishing history as a built-in legacy that will compete with those of DC and Marvel.  I think they're slightly mistaken.  Captain Midnight is very much a pulp hero, which is something Dark Horse is going for this time (and so did DC when it did the Doc Savage comics a few years ago, in a line that also revived Will Eisner's The Spirit, while some other publishers are doing every unsigned Golden Age hero).  Anyway, the final one is Brian Wood on Star Wars.  Dark Horse has done thousands of Star Wars comics at this point, as much the definition of the expanded saga as any of the books.  "Expanded" means mostly noncanonical, but that doesn't seem to bother the publisher.  Wood is an indy star, and has recently burnished that reputation with Dark Horse as writer of The Massive (which reminded me of an earlier and superior series from the same publisher known as Zero Killer).  He seems to think it's just as well as anyone else who has written Star Wars in comics or books to pretty much play fast and loose with logic in order to have "kewl" moments.  In fact, that's what his whole story with Darth Vader, set just before the events of A New Hope, is all about, and yes, Boba Fett (as is often the case with these comics) is shoehorned into the story.  Although Dark Horse does score some points from me for the soon-to-launch comics based on George Lucas's original notes for The Star Wars.

The Walking Dead (Image)
The extremely clever thing that Robert Kirkman did for this special issue was to include new material.  Most of it is reprinted from origins of characters like Michonne and the Governor (both of whom were heavily featured in the latest season of the TV series), but one of the more obscure characters (as far as my experience goes) also gets some significant love.  Tyreese appeared pretty early in the comics, but has really only just popped in the series.  He's the one who gets the exclusive material.  Apparently he was envisioned as the replacement Shane, who in my mind not only completely stole the second season but was also the best reason to watch both the season and series as a whole, emblematic of what I think is the true strength of the series, not the sensationalism but the very human foibles on display, whether in extreme circumstances or otherwise (although yes, Darryl was an immediate standout for me, too).  I've read the comic sporadically (although pretty regularly for a few months), but I think the series does it more justice.  Kirkman, especially in this special spotlighting reactions to a suddenly apocalyptic setting, does a good job of being thought-provoking, but I'm not sure if he's just incredibly cynical (although not as much as Cormac McCarthy was in The Road, and certainly not as redemptive as Stephen King in The Stand) or taking an extremely long time to explore his story (he says he envisions two hundred [or maybe it was three?] issues), and that just seems excessive and leaves most of it seem unfocused rather than methodical.