Reading Comics 228 "FCBD 2019"

What I love about Free Comic Book Day is that it's basically the best shot most companies have at being visible to the average reader.  For the folks showing up just for free comics, it probably won't make much of a difference.  For the folks who show up to comics shops every Wednesday or in any other sense on a regular basis, it's a chance to find out what companies outside of DC and Marvel are doing (because let's face it, for the average fan, it's still basically just DC and Marvel).  I don't know how many sales these free comics result in (for a long time, I bought Atomic Robo comics in part because Red 5 always included it in their FCBD releases, when Red 5 had Atomic Robo in its slate), but it says a lot about the companies, what they're willing to release for the annual celebration. 

Here again is what I got, and what I thought after reading through all of it:

Animosity Tales (AfterShock)
Marguerite Bennett's comic is basically the flagship of AfterShock, another would-be Image in a crowded indy scene.  What was more interesting than the story featured in the issue was the summary of the series to date, which reads a heck of a lot like The Walking Dead.  So if you want your zombies to instead be animals, this is the comic for you.

Bloodshot (Valiant)
I've been a supporter of the Valiant relaunch for years (not specifically from the start, but around the time The Valiant came out).  While I don't love everything they publish, I still maintain that this is the discerning superhero fan's best bet for a coherent modern landscape to follow, the Ultimate version of the classic Valiant characters, the condensed version of what the New 52 attempted.  And Bloodshot has been a part of it, and been a favorite of mine, for years.  This take is from Tim Seeley, who's been an underrated star of the modern comics landscape whether in his DC work or elsewhere.  But Seeley's take on Bloodshot feels hollow compared to what Jeff Lemire was doing.  Lemire pulled off Bloodsquirt!  He wants a Bloodshot that's actually the complete reverse of Lemire's, all action and no character study.  I thought that was the best part of the modern Bloodshot!  Anyway, also included is the latest chapter of the Rai saga, Fallen World, which reads a lot better.  It's from Dan Abnett, who could use a breakout solo project. 

Deadly Class (Image)
I'd sampled the series previously, but this particular issue was a brilliant way to highlight what makes it truly awesome, and I'm glad all over again that there's a TV adaptation, which I hope to catch.  Remender's a particularly busy creator, the hardest working concept engine not named Mark Millar, who takes all manner of risks with high concepts. 

H1 Ignition (Humanoids)
Here's Mark Waid's latest attempt at a startup.  Dude's been at this for twenty years now, and...has yet to find one that truly sticks (or as with Boom!...sticks with).  This one's all about straining for modern credibility, the social awareness that actually...turned off a lot of Marvel fans.  Maybe it works better with new characters.  I don't know.  But this preview is somewhat poorly put together.  I have little faith of it sticking any better than his previous efforts.  I have no idea why Waid strayed so far from what he did so brilliantly in the pages of The Flash.  Maybe someday he rediscovers that spark.

Interceptor (Vault)
Donny Cates is another firecracker in modern comics, but one that's working equally hard at mainstream (with Marvel) as with his personal projects.  Since this isn't a well-loved era for Marvel, fans haven't really rallied around him, but I like to see what he's doing.  I like his storytelling in this issue.  He's definitely worth keeping an eye on.

 

Punchline (Antarctic Press)

Here's the best comic I read from the bunch!  It's a superhero book from other than DC/Marvel, which is always an interesting prospect.  There will be great material done elsewhere (see: Valiant) and there will be shoddy stuff.  This looks like great stuff.

Part of what makes it look great is the artwork, naturally.  Matthew Weldon seems like the closest I'll get to classic Stuart Immonen, before he started adding detail into his clean forms.  There's some rough work in there, but Weldon is like Patrick Gleason more interested in shadow than warm figures, a moody look at its best that the touch of reality Bill Williams seeks in a script that looks more to the human than superhuman.

I like the details Williams includes, like the fact that the Black Arrow is actually two people sharing a costume to evade seekers of secret identities.  (I'd read that comic, too, thank you!)  It feels like a genuinely fresh take, just when you thought you'd seen everything.  There's a collection already available with the rest of the story, which I think I might actually track down (read: order online).  And I guess there's more new issues coming. 

Stranger Things (Dark Horse)
As I've said, I haven't been initiated into the Stranger Things cult, and this comic didn't make me consider reconsidering.  Fortunately there was also a Black Hammer backup, with Jeff Lemire presenting the "Cabin of Horrors," clearly an homage to House of Mystery and such.  Eventually we meet Jack Sabbath (familiar to Black Hammer fans?), who has just discovered that his backstory might be different than he previously thought.  Cowritten by Ray Fawkes, in defense of whom I sort of exiled myself from Millarworld a few months back.  Also discovered that Mice Templar artist Victor Santos has been working at Dark Horse recently, with a long-running espionage comic called Polar, which might be worth checking out.  See, Free Comic Book Day???  Success.

Year of the Villain (DC)
Again, not technically a FCBD release, but for the second year in a row a cheap DC comic meant to promote upcoming stories.  Scott Snyder is the brains behind a new Underworld Unleashed/Forever Evil-type event headlined by the bad guys.  I really wish Lex Luthor could just stay the antihero he's done so well in stories like Final Night and Geoff Johns' Justice League, but he keeps getting dragged back into villainy.  This is one of those stories where "he's finally gone too far."  More significantly, Brian Michael Bendis signals he may be interested in working on Batgirl comics, with a tale that finally allows Barbara Gordon to remember she was pretty badass as Oracle, too.

Star Wars Day: May the 4th Be With You (Marvel)
Again, not technically a FCBD release (but part of another of the things last Saturday was culturally).  Besides some previews for various comics, there are some creator interviews, including one spotlighting Kieron Gillen's creation of Doctor Aphra, whom he repeatedly describes as a Star Wars version of Indiana Jones.  (Yes, yes, yes: Harrison Ford played both Indy and Han Solo, but Gillen's point is that Aphra collects artifacts...but with a more nefarious agenda in mind!)  On the whole, I'm quite happy that Marvel got the rights for Star Wars back from Dark Horse (other than Dark Horse's brilliant adaptation of The Star Wars), as it sticks much closer to film material and less creating whatever the hell it wants.  I just can't decide if Aphra is closer to the Dark Horse mentality than Marvel's...

Thoughts on FCBD 2017

Well, Free Comic Book Day 2017 is in the books.  How was yours truly's experiences this year?

I'd say pretty good.  The turnout at Zimmie's (Lewiston, Maine), at least at the point I went, was fairly tepid, but that was because of the weather.  For the preceding few days rain had been predicted and I think most people were driven away even by the drizzly conditions that actually surfaced.  I got in line with about a dozen minutes to spare, and it wasn't an especially long line, based on past experience.  It was mostly families with small kids (a reliable presence any FCBD), plus a few typical comic book store patrons.

The most shocking thing was that no one seemed particularly interested in excited chatter.  That's the biggest change from past FCBD experiences.  I blame, again, the weather, although again, I wasn't in line for very long.  I like to get there early, try and be the first one there, or among the first, and that didn't happen this year.  I don't know if all the chatter died during the wait, in the anxious anticipation of the last few minutes until the store opened.  The most exciting thing that happened was someone behind me dropping a little rubber ball they'd been playing with, the ball rolling under a car, and someone they were with saying that was for the best.  But yeah, the ball rolled back into reach, in case you were worried.

Then the store opened, and the cosplay presence, at the opening hour, was a New Hampshire Ghostbuster.  Ghostbusters have showed up at this store's FCBD in the past, so that wasn't a big surprise.  Their display in the store included several books, encompassing both the original movie era and the new one, two of them the "real" books referenced in the movies.  So that was fun.

Shuffling up to the offerings, I'd already decided what I wanted to get, and that's exactly what I got, so there wasn't much of a surprise or debate there.  This year I decided to be happy to not even have a shot at just anything that looked interesting.  I didn't plot to go to another participating store (there aren't any in the area anyway), or become upset about missing one or another release. 

Besides, I took advantage of the sales in the store, too, and treating the visit as another of my sporadic trips to the store, catching up with stories I wanted to read, and anything else that caught my eye.  I got a lot of good stuff, but I'm going to talk only about the freebies here.

So here's what I got and what I thought:

I Hate Image (Image)
Yeah, I wouldn't have predicted, just a few weeks ago, that I would've been interested in this.  Skottie Young was an artist I loved passionately a few years ago, when he was doing the Oz adaptations with Eric Shanower, but then those comics ended and he moved on to I Hate Fairyland at Image.  I Hate Fairyland, to all intents and purposes, looked like a release valve, a way for Skottie to express how much he hated doing the Oz stuff.  And I was greatly taken aback.  Shocked!  But then a few weeks back, I revisited the Oz stuff.  Time and distance and all that.  It became less precious.  Artists like to stretch themselves.  Skottie had become tied down to one particular association, and it was kind of bigger than him.  Even as he was making his name doing it, it was also as much if not more about the material than Skottie Young.  So of course he wanted to distance himself from it.

I Hate Image, meanwhile, is part of the company's 25th anniversary celebration.  In the same way Skottie skewers fairyland tropes in the series this special is based on, he viciously skewers Image.  Kind of refreshing!  Definitely fun to read!  And it also kind of shows what Skottie thinks most fans will know about Image's legacy in 2017.  Here's what I learned:

• Lying Cat really is the star of Saga. 
• The Walking Dead has kind of become the most famous thing Image ever did.  It's referenced twice by Skottie, once for the comic and once for the TV show.
• There are a ton of references to other material, some more obvious than others.  You kind of really need to know more about them to really get the more obvious ones.
• Chew has reached the status of definitely standing out from the pack.  In just three panels the concept is sold better than another one a few pages earlier that I assume references Jason Aaron's Southern Bastards, but wouldn't know without looking it up.
• The Wicked + The Divine, which has been one of the company's biggest buzz books in recent years, doesn't seem to rate anything more than a kind of mocking reference about a dance club that actually spends more time referencing recently deceased pop music acts than the comic.
• Which brings about a montage of semi-famous Image superheroes.  For whatever reason, Savage Dragon is lumped into this scene, even though he's one of two company-existence-spanning characters still in print today.  More on the other in a moment.
• Yeah, the other's Spawn.  He gets one of the featured acts of the comic, even though he's been about as irrelevant as Savage Dragon for years, despite the fact that both are two hundred plus issues into their runs.
• Then Skottie ruthlessly mocks famous Image creators themselves.  Apparently Todd McFarlane really loves to call people "bud."  The mot hilarious scene of the whole comic.

I came away loving Skottie Young all over again.

Keyser Soze: Scorched Earth (Red 5)
Red 5 used to be known, at least by me, for releasing a new Atomic Robo FCBD story every year.  But Red 5 doesn't publish Atomic Robo anymore (that would be IDW).  But the company still managed to interest me this year.  Keyser Soze is the infamous lead character of Bryan Singer's breakout movie, The Usual Suspects, the character Kevin Spacey is playing all along but you don't know it until the end.  (Edward Norton is actually the actor who attempted to make a career out of characters like this, starting the year after Usual Suspects was released, in Primal Fear.)  You might think doing a Keyser Soze follow-up is about twenty-two years late, but the character and the concept behind the character totally holds up, as this comic demonstrates.  It's the mystique of Keyser Soze that makes him so fascinating, his ability to dominate even in his (apparent) absence, a storytelling idea that still remains largely absent in fiction today. There's some hoodoo in the story, Keyser lighting his glove on fire and eventually leaving a highly visible calling card for investigators, including one who considers Keyser his "white whale" (Moby Dick reference).  It's not perfectly executed, but it gets the job done.  It proves all over again what a great idea Keyser Soze is.

Secret Empire (Marvel)
Like Skottie Young, I wouldn't have guessed I'd be interested in this one just a few weeks back.  But the Captain America Is A Nazi!!! controversy has only heated up in recent weeks and it's made it impossible to ignore the existence of Secret Empire.  Much has been made about Marvel's creative choices, but none of it means Marvel isn't telling good stories.  I learned that all over again last year, with FCBD itself, when I dove into Civil War II, which turned out to be one of my favorite comics of 2016.  I don't know how much of Secret Empire I'll actually read, but I love that Nick Spencer, well before the results of the 2016 election could have possibly been known, had struck on an idea that so closely mirrors the turmoil of the times (much as Civil War II did).  The idea of Captain America being a secret agent of Hydra, no matter how it happened or how it's ultimately resolved, is absolutely perfect, suddenly.  A lot of Americans woke up to a different country, in their minds, the day Trump won the presidency.  This story is like a metaphor about that. 

I've had my problems with Nick Spencer.  I've read a little of his Captain America, and found his creative merits somewhat dubious as a result.  I've read Nick Spencer before.  He was the guy responsible for "bowtie Jimmy Olsen," and he's been tinkering around Image for a few years, too (Infinite Vacation, Morning Glories).  But this FCBD edition of Secret Empire is absolutely pitch-perfect, the best stuff I've ever seen from Spencer.  He's in total narrative command, and he sells the concept like crazy.  That's exactly what you want to see from any creator, much less one deep into one of the biggest controversies in recent comics.

He's also got Andrea Sorrentino on art, and that's a huge plus.  Sorrentino has quietly been producing some of the best art in comics for years now.  He knocked I, Vampire out of the park.  He knocked Old Man Logan out of the part.  It's high, high time everyone notices how fantastic his art really is.

So I was pretty happy to read this one.  There's also a preview of Chip Zdarsky's forthcoming Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, which brims with spidery greatness.  No offense to Dan Slott, but Chip's material here harkens back to the gloriousness of the "Brand New Day" era, still my personal touchstone for the character.

X-O Manowar (Valiant)
This presentation of Matt Kindt's relaunch of the character isn't substantially different from what's found in the recently launched series itself, so instead I'll focus on the other material in the release.  There's a preview of Secret Weapons, which among other things features Nicole Finch, who can talk to birds.  Among a host of characters trying desperately to strike on a current sensibility, I think she fits it as well as anyone else.  I'd read a Nicole Finch, Bird Talker comic, easily.  The series also touches on the new era of data leaks, which is brilliant.

There's also a look at Jeff Lemire's latest evolution of Bloodshot, Bloodshot Salvation.  Lemire has become one of the best writers working in comics today, and his Bloodshot is a leading example of how that happened, and he shows no signs of slowing down.

There are also incredibly vague references to other stuff Valiant will be publishing in the future, none of which I found particularly effective.  Would love more Death-Defying Doctor Mirage, though...