Fade Out: Painless Suicide (WiseDog)
From 2014.
I'm not entirely sure what this was supposed to be. It starts out like it's going to be about suicide. And then young love. Young love and suicide? Makes sense. But then it's about a murder mystery. And then the murder mystery ends with the main character being murdered. Not, you know, committing suicide. So I guess...I just don't get it.
Fantastic Four #1 (Marvel)
From 1961.
History could have read this so much differently. Mister Fantastic (Plastic Man/Elongated Man) and Human Torch (the Golden Age Human Torch) were archetypes of existing superheroes, while the Thing and Invisible Girl were culled straight from horror movies...In fact, the whole thing seemed to be Stan Lee and Jack Kirby creating horror characters more than superheroes, but using them as superheroes. The team launched the Marvel Age, and as such became known as the first superheroes to inhabit the angst-ridden, "human level" variety Marvel became known for, but...they were horror creations, tossed together like Van Helsing meets League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Doom Patrol, the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk, these were all characters more akin to horror, which at that time cinematically was still steeped in the classic horror age, before the dawn of the slasher flicks twenty years later. Just imagine if the team had remained known as horror characters, rather than superheroes...But then, Marvel became known as DC's main competition, and the rest is history. Characters who slipped in from the frames of movies have transitioned into the movies, where they have become a whole genre like, well, the horror movies that inspired them. It figures.
Fatherhood #1 (Challenger)
From 2013.
This one-shot is much like Fade Out, tonally somewhat baffling. The writer describes it as attempting to explore what it means to be a father (hence the, ah, title), fighting between impulses of great devotion and the ability to do very questionable things because of that great devotion...but the story abruptly shifts from being about the pain of a separated marriage to the father going all psycho and pseudo-noir as he gets the latest popular toy for his daughter. Like Fade Out, I can say I just don't get it. You understand, this essentially means, these are poorly-reasoned comics.
Fighting Stranger: Chapter One (HicksVillain)
From 2013.
Fighting Stranger is...strange. And it becomes stranger. The good news is that it's a good kind of strange. The writing is at turns incredibly clever and clunky. Thankfully the cleverness outweighs the clunk. And the cleverness extends a few ways, from how the stereotypical story of an amnesiac being guided along a journey to discovering he has certain skills and purpose is reshaped by how it's done (by the end of this chapter, there's a whole new level added) and with what kind of characters. The most important character isn't the lead at all, but his guide, the dancing entertainbot C4D, who proves endlessly amusing. Good stuff.
First Law of Mad Science #1 (Noreon)
From 2012.
By the time a quote from H.P. Lovecraft shows up at the end, I guess what precedes it makes perfect sense. Lovecraft has inspired something of a religion. I doubt his fans would consider their devotion to be a religion...but yeah, it's something like a religion at this point. The story involves a scientist who's a pretty crummy father, a son who is resentful of his scientist father being so crummy, cybernetic eyes, robot daughters, seeing monsters that aren't there...Damn Lovecraft fans. I rue the day I ever learned about Lovecraft!
The Flash (DC)
#30 (from 1989)
#54 (from 1991)
#162 (from 2000)
I was recommended the first two when Flash comics went on sale in celebration of the new TV series launching. For me they're rare Wally West stories not written by Mark Waid, but rather William Messner-Loebs. There came a point where I no longer believed this, but during the '90s, when he was writing The Flash, Waid could do no wrong. He was, for me, the definitive writer of not only Wally West but the Flash in general. So for someone to recommend reading issues from the same series Waid later made his own felt like an impossible mission. Waid came onboard years after the series launched, which meant he wasn't the first writer to attempting defining what it meant for Wally to have assumed the scarlet cowl, succeeding his friend and mentor Barry Allen. But the recommendation was, Messner-Loebs made Wally's life as a speedster interesting. And so?
The first issue features Wally in a theater realizing that time seems to have stopped. But it didn't, he merely sped up without realizing it. That's a pretty neat trick. Not that special, but pretty neat. The second issue is probably better. This recommendation made it known that Wally's "Nobody dies" edict alone was special, but there's also diving out of a plane to catch someone, and that was special. Messner-Loebs, it seems, got what being a speedster could feel like. Waid always concentrated on the legacy, but here's a writer who slowed things down (heh) and let Wally, and the reader, experience how the powers actually work. Sometimes it takes a great deal of effort. This is something that's rarely touched on in superhero comics. That alone makes #54 unique.
The third issue, meanwhile, was Waid's final one (until All Flash #1 in 2007, which kicked off the era recently resurrected in Convergence: Speed Force) after his long, historic tenure. By this point he'd been transitioning away, giving more and more responsibility to Brian Augustyn, and so maybe it's not surprising that there's not really a farewell message here, as I would have expected. I took a break from comics in early 1999, when Waid was working on his last great Flash arc, "Chain Lightning," a story whose conclusion I finally read a few years back. The truth is, I thought for years that Waid left after "Chain Lightning," that it was his big goodbye. Turns out he lingered. The issue instead is a pretty random Captain Marvel team-up. I consider this disappointing. Or maybe the disappointment was Waid's. Either way, he did return to the character (fans always considered that work disappointing), but by that point Wally had become a Geoff Johns guy. Which turned out pretty well, until Johns decided he was more of Barry Allen guy...
Flash Gordon #1 (Dynamite)
From 2014.
Flash Gordon is one of those characters most people know but don't really know much about. He's a space adventurer in the vein of Star-Lord, the currently popular model as seen in last year's popular Guardians of the Galaxy flick. And he's more or less fallen completely by the wayside. So of course he gets a revival. The question is, does the revival remind us what makes Flash Gordon unique? Not really. Very quickly, we're dumped in the middle of an adventure, Ming, all of that. Which is fine. if you like random adventure stories set on alien worlds, then this is your thing. But if you want a reason to care for Flash Gordon specifically again, this may not be. Because otherwise the character has become as equally random as the story he's in. I personally don't see this as a particularly good development.
Footprints Vol. 1 (Soup Dad)
From 2014.
If you ever wanted to find out what it would be like if Alan Moore wrote Hellboy in the same general style he did Watchmen...Footprints follows Bigfoot in much the way the early issues of Fables followed the Big Bad Wolf. You don't know why Bigfoot became a private investigator except that the story felt like putting him in that role. And then he has to solve the mystery of what's been happening to the cryptoid community. Tries to make bold statements about the 20th century. Fails. Scott Snyder provides an introduction, although he unwittingly reveals what kind of experience you're really headed for when he begins by explaining how he used to watch a bad Bigfoot special on TV all the time, and he got hooked on it. That's what this basically is.
FUBAR: FCBD Edition (Alterna)
From 2013.
Soldiers in various eras blah-blah-blah random monsters! And that's basically all this is. If you like random monsters, I guess you'd probably like this more than I did. And as for all those acronyms...FUBAR = F***ed Up Beyond All Reason (it's a military term, naturally), FCBD = Free Comic Book Day. Which incidentally is this Saturday!
From 2013.
Deliriously funny stuff from Michael D. Koch (presumably not related to the Derek Koch I got to know from Paperback Reader, who actually probably would like stuff like Footprints), a collection of some old indy comic strip material filled with terrific gags and wacky situations that are kind of what Family Guy tries to do (which is not to say that Family Guy fails so much that Koch does it better). His noble work continues, weirdly enough, at a site called Fun Fun Comics. Later in the collection, Hamlet tries to warn Mel Gibson about the talking skull. But of course it doesn't matter. I guess I'm just a sucker for this kind of stuff. And what about Michael Bolton? As everyone who's seen Office Space knows, Michael Bolton sucks. But that's hardly the last word on him. Probably you should read this to find out more...
The Fuse #1 (Image)
From 2014.
I may have sold The Fuse short. This is because I know the writer, Antony Johnston, from something that I love, the recently concluded post-apocalyptic epic Wasteland, and so when Fuse launched a little over a year ago, I wasn't quite ready to dive into another Johnston project. I mean, Wasteland happens once a lifetime, right? And Johnston launched another series at the same time, Umbral. The thing is, Umbral is a lot more like Wasteland than Fuse. What they all share is Johnston's knack for world-building. But where Wasteland and Umbral set up years-long stories, Fuse is, basically, a procedural set on a space station (the title is the name of the station). I actually liked what I read when I sampled Fuse previously, but again, I wasn't ready to make another commitment. Reading the first issue for the first time, after the end of Wasteland, I think I'm ready. This is good stuff. And so I will be correcting my oversight first chance I get.
I read some of those in that one bundle.
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