Ythaq: The Forsaken World #1

Even if you aren't a huge Marvel fan, you have to tip your hat for what they've managed to accomplish. In a decade's time they've gone from bankruptcy to being the dominant force in the comics industry. Personally, I haven't been too pleased with the majority of their superhero titles the last couple of years-- I find many of them too dark, too event-driven, characterization-poor, continuity ignorant and both inappropriate for and impenetrable to potential younger readers. But they do sell like crazy, and it's hard to argue with success. Also, it's dangerous to generalize-- they do cater to old-timers like me with stuff like Agents of Atlas, retro Spider-Man minis, and various Joe Casey continuity-implants. Marvel has also done a fine job of branching out and trying to appeal to a wider range of potential readers. They adapt other media with projects like Dark Tower, Magician, Anita Blake, and even classics such as the Odyssey or Treasure Island. For SF and space opera lovers like you and me there's the terrific line of Annihilation books and, more importantly for the purposes of this review, their well-advised partnership with the European publisher Soleil.

Whoever's job it is to select which Soleil properties to bring over to the U.S., I say "bravo" to you and keep up the good work. In my first post on this blog I extolled the virtues of Universal War One (now available in a collected hardback, btw). I didn't collect Sky Doll or Samurai, but saw how gorgeous they look, and I think their latest release, Christophe Arleston and Adrien Floch’s Ythaq: the Forsaken World, may be their most beautiful book yet.

Lieutenant Granite Welgoat is an astronavigator aboard the Comet's Tail, a luxury starliner ferrying wealthy clientele between exotic worlds. As punishment for repeated tardiness in reporting for duty, Granite has been assigned the lowly task of serving drinks to the passengers. Which is why she is behind the bar in the Marina Lounge when a strange spatial anomaly literally tears the ship apart. Luckily, individual sections of the ship are designed to seal up and become self-sustaining escape pods in case of emergency. Trapped inside with a tousled-haired happy-go-lucky maintenance tech named Narvarth and a gorgeous but snooty young socialite named Callista, Granite rides the escape vessel as it breaks away from the doomed cruiser and plunges down to the surface of an uncharted world in the middle of nowhere.

The first issue doesn't really explain why or by whom the planet Ythaq is "forsaken", but it certainly is a strange and perilous place for three strangers to make their way through. After a rough ocean landing, their entire escape craft is swallowed whole by a giant sea monster. No sooner do they get out of this fix then they are put on trial by fuzzy tusked primitives with speech impediments for wrecking half their village. The trio land in one predicament after another as they cross the foreign landscape in search of fellow survivors, as well as chunks of the downed ship that may contain a transponder that can be used to signal for help.

As if navigating across a strange world and dealing with its bizarre lifeforms wasn't enough of a challenge, our heroes remain barely a step ahead of deadly saurian-steeded warriors breathing down their neck. These mercs are in the service of the local ruler, a sadistic femme fatale bedecked in jeweled silks and cowl called Margrave Ophyde. It not entirely clear why she's so hot to capture as many survivors as possible, but considering she whips and even eviscerates even her own lackeys who displease her, it can't be anything good.

Allow me to commence gushing profusely: Adrien Floch's artwork is absolutely gorgeous. Based on his landscapes, cityscapes, costume design and creature creations, he would be a boon to any movie production; everything is rendered in painstaking detail and every page crackles with imagination. The aliens are fascinating and the girls are sexy (I suppose Narvarth is sexy too, if you're into that sort of thing). One major regret is the artwork has been shrunk down from its original album size to fit a standard American comic page. On the upside, each page has four tiers of story rather than the usual three, meaning more story in a book already a generous 61(!) pages in length. You'll be wanting to reach for a magnifying glass to take in every aspect of Floch's exacting work.

Do yourself a solid and find a copy of Ythaq: the Forsaken World #1-- if your LCS doesn't have any, ask 'em to order you one, or hie thee to the internets. I do worry about the long-term success of the Marvel/Soleil venture; it's so far outside the safe spandex-clad comfort zone of most U.S. comic readers. In my pessimistic way, I do expect it to be a noble failure. But hope springs eternal, and as long as fantastic books of this level of quality continue to be released, I'll be first in line to snap 'em up!

Rating: 9.5/10

The Enterprise Experiment

IDW is the latest in a long line of comic publishers to take a crack at the Star Trek franchise. Over the years, Gold Key, Marvel, DC, Malibu and Wildstorm have produced Star Trek comics, but I’ve never been overly impressed with any company’s version. For one thing, Star Trek rarely seems to attract top-notch artists. And while Lucasfilm over the years has done an admirable job of coordinating all their tie-ins so they fit in one coherent overall storyline, the Star Trek series are all over the place, and don’t tie together well at all. Do the IDW books fall into the same trap?

The Enterprise Experiment was co-written by D.C. Fontana, who is a veritable legend among Trek writers, having been consistently involved with the franchise from its inception. Fontana has written episodes of Star Trek, the Animated Series, the Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine, as well as the novel Vulcan’s Glory and the scripts for several Trek video games. She obviously has a very intimate knowledge of these characters and their universe, which comes through clearly on the page. I do have to question, though, whether the non-Trekkie who is not versed in the lore will be able to pick this up and enjoy it as straight science fiction adventure.

The first two issues of the Enterprise Experiment serve as a sequel to the classic TOS episode “The Enterprise Incident”, which was also written by Fontana 40 years ago. In that story, Spock hoodwinked a female Romulan commander and the Enterprise made off with the Romulans’ cloaking device. This book opens about 2 years later and the Enterprise has been selected to test out the Federation’s own version of the device. Unfortunately, all does not go as planned and the ship and her crew begin to slowly phase out of their proper dimensional plane. In the midst of this crisis, who should show up on the scene but a Romulan bird of prey, commanded by the very same commander who lost her cloaking device in the first place? (what, I ask you, what are the odds?) The majority of this two-parter consists of a running (and floating, when the artificial gravity goes out) firefight with a Romulan boarding party, while Scotty is frantically trying to solidify the ship before everyone fades out of existence.

The artist on this book is Gordon Purcell, who also has been associated with Trek for a pretty long time, having pencilled many issues of the DC Star Trek series during the eighties and nineties. I’m sorry to say that I find Purcell’s work to be competent and serviceable while being almost completely uninteresting and unexciting. In fact, the artwork is so dull that I almost dozed off just now while typing Purcell’s name. I feel like Purcell gets these gigs primarily because he is quite good at making the character’s likenesses match the real actors who play them. While that would be a neat bonus if Bones looks like DeForrest Kelley and Sulu looks like George Takei (Oh my!) it’s of much less importance to me than exciting storytelling and fantastic imagery, which this book unfortunately lacks.

By the way, the script doesn’t do Purcell any favors, either. Way too much of this book takes place in the interiors of ships and shuttles. It reminds me of “bottle shows” of bygone Trek series, where the producers needed to save budget so the entire episode would take place on pre-existing sets. This is a comic, for Surak’s sake, they can take the adventure literally anywhere and have nearly anything happen, yet we get page after page of constricting ship interiors. Even when the story calls for some eye-popping visuals they still blow it. At one point, in order to escape from the Romulans, Kirk decides to fly the phased Enterprise right through a pulsar. Surely that would make for an exciting page of visuals, right? For some unfathomable reason the decision was made to set this scene on the bridge with no exterior shots at all! The only panel to even suggest that they are flying through a star shows the bridge crew shielding their eyes from the blinding glare! (And by the way, couldn't they just turn off the viewscreen until they make it out the other side? Sheesh!)

The third and fourth issues comprise a second adventure, in which the Klingon Captain Kor gains possession of a powerful artifact of the ancient alien race known as the Preservers. The device resembles a similar device that messed with Kirk's head on the planet Amerind (in "The Paradise Syndrome"), and Kirk is desperate that the Klingons should not gain the knowledge of this incomprehensibly advanced technology. The crew actually gets to get off the ship in this one, going planetside and also storming the Klingons' base to steal the artifact back. Sulu gets a moment in the sun disguised as a Klingon and seeing some undercover action.

One of the strongest elements of this miniseries is how effortlessly Fontana and her co-writer Derek Chester weave together disparate elements of Trek continuity and work them into a coherent narrative. The final part of this tale leads to a confrontation with a member of the Organians, who previously enforced a policy of non-violence between humans and Klingons. In the final pages we learn some interesting tidbits about the Preservers, including that the Organians serve them, the Great Galactic Barrier was created by them, and that they predict Lt. Arex's race the Edosians have an important role to play in the future development of the galaxy. You will also see flashback cameos with Jim's nephew Kirk, McCoy's daughter JoAnna, Sarek, Carol and David Marcus. And the phasing/cloak connection clearly foreshadows the TNG episode "The Pegasus". Again, Trek fans will probably be intrigued by what I just wrote, everyone else is likely to scratch their heads and say "The what now?"

These IDW miniseries are being billed as Star Trek: Year Four, the premise being to show the fourth year of the Enterprise's five-year mission, if the show hadn't been cancelled when it was. Which seems a bit laughable because there are already roughly a couple of hundred books and comics covering this same time period. However, upon further examination while Fontana and Chester draw on tons of TV and movie references, this book pretty much ignores all the other previous tie-in material. For instance, a quick look at Memory Beta shows that, including this mini, there are now at least 3 different creators of the Galactic Barrier, and several different explanations as to why the Organians stopped intervening in violence between the Federation and the Klingon empire. Like I said, Star Wars expanded universe is well done, Trek expanded universe is a big incoherent mess.

I feel like I need to give The Enterprise Experiment two ratings, one for Trekkies and one for the non-initiated. I think that Trek fans will dig the characterization, the bits of Trek lore peppered throughout, and the interesting way the creators tie various elements of the history together, at the same time teasing intriguing future storylines. Those who don't know Trek are likely to see some blandly rendered gunfights, some chasing, a bit of trickery, and a lot of weird retro looking clothes and sets. This comic is preaching to the choir.

Trekkie rating: 7.5/10
Non-Trekkie rating: 6/10

Space Doubles Collection #1: Set the Controls

Th3rd World Studios' Space Doubles is a project that I admire out of proportion to how much I actually enjoyed it. Combining horror and science fiction dates back to the infancy of the SF genre-- after all, many consider Frankenstein to be the very first science fiction novel. There were plenty of pulp stories to crossbreed these genres, and the EC Comics of the 50's like Weird Science were only the most famous of the many comic titles of this ilk. With this new collection, Th3rd World clearly wants to pick up the standard and continue the tradition, which I totally support in theory. I just wish I liked the book more than I do.

I think I mentioned in a previous post that I'm not a huge fan of short stories, be they in prose or comic form. It's like hearing a joke; you can't tell if it's a good joke until you get to the punchline. The difference is, a joke takes 20 seconds or so to tell, but you have to invest a bit longer in a story. And if the end doesn't work for me I feel like I wasted my time reading it in the first place. And in the rare case I like a story, I then sometimes wish the author could have fleshed it out and made a proper book out of it. If I am reading a book and I'm not enjoying it, I've been known to bail, or at least skip to the end. With a short story, it seems silly to quit once I've started, so I slog on and hope the "punchline" redeems my time investment.

Space Doubles was originally released as a miniseries with a flip-book format. The title derives from the fact that each side of the book had an 11 or 12 page story, from a variety of different creators. There are more than six stories in this collection because some of these were meant for the never-published fourth and fifth issues, and therefore are presented here for the first time. The book is unfortunately in black and white, but that is no doubt a necessity for a rookie publisher in a merciless marketplace.

"Red Rain" by Mike Raicht and Alecia Rodriguez concerns a mysterious mist which clouds the moon, and an intrepid band of astronauts which is sent to investigate. What they find is bad-- very bad. Both the script and the art are pretty good, but at the end of the day it's just another alien invasion story.
Rating: 7/10

"Everywhere I Look...Bugs!" by Scott Closter (the creator of this series) and Philip Schaufelberger is a pretty neat idea for a mind-bending story hobbled by iffy artwork. It concerns a pretty boy media darling who goes slightly bonkers after a transportation mission to bring flora and fauna to the terraformed moon of Titan. It has a great creepy vibe and twisty finale; it's too bad the main character, supposedly pegged as "James Dean of the Moons" by the media, looks more like Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Oof.
Rating: 6.5/10

"A Saucerful of Secrets" by Jason Hall, Ron Chan and Rich Ellis explores the interesting idea that in the future everyone's life is a blog, but if the public becomes too bored with your experiences you get filed away in a life support tube instead of leeching off our valuable resources. The lead character has already lost his girlfriend and now he's desperate to make his life more interesting.
Rating: 7.5/10

"Escape Pod" by Mark Andrew Smith and Matthew Huynh is a somewhat lightweight entry about a supermarket clerk confined by modern living and puzzled about his former life prior to a car accident that left him with amnesia. The answer is pure wish-fulfillment, baby. Huynh has an interesting style reminiscent of Paul Pope, but he needs to work a little more on things like perspective.
Rating: 6/10

My favorite story in this collection is "Sympathizers" by Justin Robinson and Aneurin Wright, which actually uses the short format to good purpose by giving us a long view of relations between humanity and a sympathetic alien race that comes to Earth seeking asylum and a new start. Turns out their homeworld was ravaged by war and the Quagaar have relocated to escape their warmongering brethren. Initially they are welcomed with open arms, but relations become decidedly strained when the violent tribes from their homeworld begin spreading out and attacking human colonies.
Rating: 8.5/10

"The Liberty Movement" by Dwight L. MacPherson and Kevin Mellon is a pretty good little alternate timeline future Nazi Empire tale. To say that Gestapo interrogator Niklas Rommel is conflicted in his work is an understatement to say the least. A visit from the leather-clad freedom fighter called the Liberator changes everything. Manages to be both fun and dark, no easy feat.
Rating: 8/10

"AKA" by Ben Raab, Deric Hughs and Pat Quinn is a lame serial killer story that I wasn't feeling in any way.
Rating: 5/10

"Project Obeah" by Leah Moore, John Reppion, and Jeremy Dale is a perfectly serviceable zombies in space tale that doesn't transcend the genre in any noticeable way. A bit of a Twilight Zone style twist at the end isn't enough to distinguish it from any number of other zombie tales on the stands these days.
Rating: 7.5/10

"Finite" by Andrew Dabb and Lee O'Conner is a super-creepy exploration of what happens when a fairly desperate man has the power to perform a mercy killing on an entire devolving culture. Brutal.
Rating: 8/10

"Rehab" by Mike Baron and David Newbold has the worst art in the issue by far, and the story is far from Baron's best either. It's about a failed bank robber with robotics skills who strikes up an unlikely friendship with the warden. Really.
Rating: 4/10

So there you have it: as you can see, a decidedly mixed bag. I leave it up to you, dear reader, to decide if a cumulative rating of 6.8 is good enough to warrant a buy. If you skip the few duds, you will probably have a better overall experience than I did. I wish Th3rd World well with future annuals in this series, but in this instance I sure wish I could have checked this out of the public library instead of shelling out... however much I paid for this thing. How do comic shops know what to charge for this-- I can't find a price anywhere on it!

Gigantic #1

Do I even need to write a full review of Gigantic to clue you guys in to how awesome it is? Just take a look at this cover, it pretty much says it all: giant robot dudes, alien attackers, massive-scale carnage in the streets, panicked bystanders about to be stomped like ants… what more do you need to know?

Even if Gigantic was simply a giant monster fight, that would be quite fun, if somewhat limited. However, writer Rick Remender also finds time to fit in a budding romance, biting commentary on multimedia addiction, and, oh yeah, the secret origin of our entire species and the Earth! Not bad for a single 23-page story, eh?

Turns out that neither God nor evolution were responsible for our ascension. Humanity, in all its aggressive, irrational, superstitious and confrontational glory is actually the creation of extraterrestrial TV executives, who intentionally populated us on an artificial planet with an extreme range of environments. The motive: ratings. The internecine conflict between our nations is served up on “Channel Earth” for the amusement of bored TV watchers of a vast, complacent galactic audience! It’s the greatest secret origin of the Earth since Douglas Adams postulated that it’s a supercomputer for the mice!

Apparently after so many years of war and strife, viewers have become bored and ratings are slackening. Suddenly one morning, a 100-foot-tall armored guy materializes in the streets of downtown San Francisco. In just a few minutes of fumbling around in confusion, the metal behemoth knocks over buildings, squishes pedestrians and generally causes massive death and destruction. Worse, his armor is about to overload and discharge vast amounts of energy, compelling the well-meaning but misunderstood invader to start leaping about the city in search of a safe place to blow up. But then the giant alien bounty hunters pop in to engage him in 10-story-tall mortal combat!

Again, if this kind of stuff isn’t up your alley, nothing I say will convince you to pick this up. All I can say is I found Gigantic #1 to be fantastic fun. Rick Remender’s script is equal parts intelligent, silly, and wicked. Eric Nguyen’s artwork is terrific and really raises the bar that much higher. Sometimes when there is a light or humorous bent to the book, there a tendency for some publishers to settle for more basic and/or cartoony art, since the comic isn’t meant to be taken “seriously” (see Martian Confederacy or M-Theory, for instance) Nguyen’s top-notch pencils class up a book that might otherwise be dismissed as lightweight. His imagination produces funky aliens, cool armor, great…uh, smashed cars…

As a total aside, this comic also brought back to me fond memories of wasting countless quarters playing the Rampage arcade game at the mall when I was a teenager. I swear there’s few things in life as fun as smashing down buildings, swatting planes, and eating people. Looking up the game on wikipedia I see that it has been translated to many home gaming systems, but I just know it from the old-school arcade version. For all you young whippersnappers out there, once upon a time we actually had to go to this separate place where all the video games were lined up in a row and… aww, skip it.



I checked out a good interview with Remender at Comic Book Resources where I learned that Gigantic is meant to be an ongoing series, released in miniseries-sized chunks. I was a little bit surprised at this, because as fun as this first issue is, I have to wonder how many cities Remender and Nguyen can knock down before it starts to lose its novelty. But these guys are so talented and imaginative, if anyone can make it work, they can.

Rating: 8.5/10

M-Theory #1

The creators of M-Theory pretty much state their intentions right on the cover, which is clearly an homage to the EC sci-fi comics of the 50s. This title is chock full of retro elements that wouldn’t be out of place in those books of old: aliens, monsters, robots, and space rangers armed with ray guns and jetpacks populate these pages. Sadly, the theme doesn’t continue on the artistic side, which doesn’t reflect the EC style in any way and is a big letdown.

With so many ingredients thrown into the mix, writers Dwight L. MacPherson and Bruce Brown unveil no fewer than three plotlines in the premiere issue in this mini. The first involves the fallout from America’s first contact with aliens in, you guessed it, Roswell New Mexico. The second takes place in Princeton’s science department during Albert Einstein’s tenure there and in the third we are off in deep space with the aforementioned spacemen. Presumably these threads will all dovetail together by the end, though how they will be able to coherently accomplish this in just 3 issues remains to be seen.

The lead character of the Roswell section is Friedrick Goetz, a jaded and cynical inventor with his own robot sidekick in tow. Goetz witnessed the arrival of the aliens firsthand, although in this version of events they didn’t crash but rather landed safely and were subsequently blasted out of existence by the trigger-happy U.S. army. Before dying, one of the aliens transfers its consciousness into Goetz, giving him instant knowledge of an entire otherworldly civilization. Over the next five years, Goetz toils in a secret underground research facility replicating the aliens’ technological marvels, but he is bitterly certain the government will never allow the average citizen the benefit of their use.

In the Princeton section, Agnes Font is a young physicist who has built a “quantum receiver” capable of communicating with other dimensions for her master’s project. Now I’m all for equal opportunity, but it seems anachronistic to have one of Einstein’s contemporaries be a cute young female, but then I wasn’t around in the 50s so maybe I just have a wrongheaded idea of gender roles in that time. Anyway, in a classic “be careful what you wish for” scenario, Agnes’ device succeeds in making contact with an alien consciousness which reaches out from wherever-- but when their minds meet she’s overwhelmed and passes out.

In the third and most action-packed section, three unidentified dudes in spacesuits travel around space blasting just about everything that crosses their sights. As I read along, I had in my mind that perhaps these were U.S. soldiers utilizing the tech that Goetz was developing, but really that’s just guesswork on my part. It’s never mentioned who these guy are, what they’re up to, or even if they’re from Earth. Their “shoot first, ask questions later” attitude is reminiscent of the army in the Roswell scene, so maybe that’s meant to be a hint.

Mike Barentine’s pencils killed a lot of my potential enjoyment of this issue. I realize there are not many artists around today who can compare to Wally Wood or Al Williamson, but at least an attempt should have been made to emulate the EC art style in some way. Barentine’s zany Mad Magazine-style cartooning is not only not attractive, it makes the whole project seem lightweight and disposable, as if the creators are saying “you weren’t planning to in any way take this seriously, were you?” If someone put a blaster to my head and forced me to say something positive, I would point out that Barentine draws good distinctive faces, but that’s about it.

Behind the scenes, the situation with M-Theory seems as messy and disjointed as what’s between the pages. After issue two had already been solicited MacPherson and company decided to part ways with Shadowline and Image over compensation issues, the result being that issue one is the only one you are likely to see on the stands anytime soon. Now I notice that issue two (but not one) has been posted on WOWIO, so it doesn’t seem likely that any kind of profit is going to be turned on this thing.

It’s a pity that I don’t dig M-Theory more, it has all the elements of a fun little retro tale, but the creators don’t seem to be saying much new or interesting with them. And the art simply isn’t my thing. I appreciate the effort, but I would only give the finished product a 6/10. It’s too bad they couldn’t get Al Williamson out of retirement to draw this, but then again they probably couldn’t afford him, especially if they’re going to be giving the issues away for free.

Devoid of Life

I wouldn't normally want to give too much away about the big bad in a horror story, but in case of the new Image graphic novel Devoid of Life, the nature of the terrifying aliens is explained in the back cover blurb, and they are depicted in all of their shambling glory on the front. The Xenos hail from an unknown planet in our solar system, which remains outside of human knowledge because they hunt down and kill anyone who discovers the secret of its existence. These hideous creatures mean business: if they cannot contain the threat, they will jump straight to genocide. The opening pages, set 5,000 years in the past, depict the end of the Martian civilization after they discover the Xenos homeworld.

The heroine of our tale is Rochelle Bonner, who is police chief of a small American town called Andini. While Rochelle seems to have the responsibilities of her job well in hand, privately she is plagued by extreme anxiety linked to a fuzzy half-remembered incident from her childhood. Her troublesome past is affecting her marriage, to the point where her husband Garrett has decided they need some time apart. In other words, her world is already falling apart even before the really strange stuff starts happening.

Rochelle's work day starts out with a trip to a local farm where an entire cornfield has simply disappeared overnight. On her way back through town, she suffers through an extensive waking dream in which she is trapped in a creepy deserted building which is somehow reminiscent of her hazy past trauma. Her worst day ever culminates in the discovery of a massacre at the Andini Observatory. And who happens to be the now late designer of the new telescope which had unfortunately noticed the Xenos homeworld? Garrett's brother, Victor.

Writer/Artist Raffaele Ienco's greatest strength is his artwork, which is amazingly assured and effective considering this is only his second published work. He is equally adept at depicting people having a quiet conversation or twisted in a rictus of death; cars and buildings believably coexsist with gruesome monsters and walking corpses. Ienco clearly has a great awareness of and love for the elements of effective horror. The imagery throughout this graphic novel is genuinely creepy and thrilling. If a J-horror director were to film a Lovecraftian mythos story, it would look something like this.

But then there's the ending. I'd like to think I'm not a total dummy, but I'm having a hell of a time connecting all the dots when it comes to this book's final act. For starters, the climax hinges on one of the characters having possession of-- well let's just say it's not something you can pick up at the local five-and-dime. And while it's to be expected that Rochelle's mystery past will tie into the current crisis somehow, the specifics cause logical knots of Donnie Darko proportions. Where did that opportune pack of wolves come from? What's with all the helicopters? If I didn't know better, I would almost think there were pages missing somewhere along the way.

I would love for someone to option Devoid of Life, because it would make one scary-ass movie. As it stands, I would rate this book a 7.5, but if someone could explain to me what the heck was going on towards the end, that rating could easily go up or down. In any case, Raffaele Ienco is a talent and I intend to keep an eye out for his future work.

UPDATE 10/24/08: Well, my tongue was in cheek when I talked about having the ending explained to me, but Raffaele Ienco himself contacted me to patiently explain what I was missing. Lest anyone think the book is too complicated, let me assure you that it all pulls together quite nicely, as long as you understand that prolonged proximity to the Xenos has made White super super smart, like Brainiac 5-level smart.

Raffaele gave me permission to reprint his email, but I think it gives away too many spoilers. In classic "give em an inch and they'll take a mile" style, I briefly considered trying to convince Raffaele to grant me a short interview, but I decided not to pester him because let's face it, how many readers can this blog possibly have? Besides, I came across a pretty good interview at Comic Book Resources that answers most of the questions I would have asked anyway.

Anyway, I hearby bump up my rating to an even 8. Devoid of Life is good scary fun, everyone go out and buy 5 copies!

Serpo

I am a big fan of science fiction, but for the purposes of this review let me emphasize the word "fiction". I don't believe in UFOs and I find ludicrous the thought that we are constantly being secretly visited by extraterrestrials who completely avoid detection, if for no other reason than the governments of the world don't have the competence to pull off such a vast cover-up. I expect with a universe as vast as ours, there is certainly other life out there, but I tend to think of it more as single-celled organisms or a nice grey-green moss, perhaps. But an advanced civilization with interstellar capabilities and an interest in crop circles and anal probing? Not so much. But it's fun to imagine.

The new Devil's Due graphic novel Serpo purports to be a comics dramatization of real-life events as documented on the website Serpo.org. According to the conspiracy theorists there, Roswell New Mexico was indeed the crash site of a UFO in 1947, and one surviving alien was recovered from the wreckage. In this iteration of that old chestnut, the Greys are referred to as "Ebens" (short for extraterrestrial biological entity) and hail from Serpo, which is said to be a habitable planet in the Zeta Reticuli system. Messages sent back to Serpo from the crash survivor pave the way for a cultural exchange during which 12 American soldiers traveled to the alien world for over 10 years to learn about their people.

Like I said, I don't buy any of this for a second, but it's a perfectly fine premise for a work of fiction. Unfortunately creators Jason M. Burns and Joe Eisma come far short of hitting a home run on this one, it's more like an infield single. There's no one thing that ruins my enjoyment, but rather an accumulation of a lot of little nitpicks that add up.

The framing sequence of this story involves the very tired device of the intrepid reporter being run around in circles by a mystery informant. He gains access to the hush-hush journal of the supposed leader of the expedition (referred to as 102, since nobody involved can reveal their true identities), and almost immediately shadowy Men in Black are out to get him. Isn't this the easiest route to go and very stale by this point? We all know that the reporter will keep hitting brick walls, never find a credible witness, and won't be able to break this story so the whole world comes to know and believe. Sorry, did I just ruin the ending for ya?

The diary isn't even written that convincingly, it almost sounds like an invention rather than a credible artifact. For instance, one entry starts off like this: "July 21, 1965: Almost two years had passed between the initial introduction of the team to Project Crystal Knight and the day of the actual exchange." Wait, what does he mean "had passed"? If he's writing in a journal, wouldn't the entry be in the present tense, "have passed"? It sounds more like someone writing his memoirs from a much later date, as if Burns forgot what form his narrative was supposed to be taking. And why are the first few entries colored a uniform beige, and then for no reason the flashbacks are in color for the rest of the way?

By the way, the two year gap mentioned above points out another problem I had with the graphic novel: time just shoots by too fast. In less than 75 pages we must zip through nearly two decades of the narrator's experiences, making this at times seem more like a Cliffs Notes of a much more involved (and possibly rewarding) story. Very little of the characters beyond the two leads are fleshed out at all. The fact that there are just two women on the trip with many males is never even mentioned. No one hooks up or even gets knocked up during a 10 year mission? At one point Serpo is attacked by another race, but we never see them again or learn more about them. At the end of the first chapter, one angry member of the mission gets himself in hot water with the Eben lawmakers, but this is completely glossed over at the beginning of the next.

This character, called 203, is particularly egregious because he is so ridiculously insubordinate and untrustworthy. If I were a solider, I would be insulted that this character is even implied to have made it through training without washing out, let alone being picked for an elite team representing our entire race.

And ultimately, the Ebens really aren't all that interesting. They dress in boring robes and live in boring huts. Like humans, they have families, bury their dead underground, and play soccer. In short, I wish the aliens were more alien. I suppose the creators could try to argue that their hands were tied because that's what “really happened“, and that's what Grey culture is “really like“. If so, they would have been better off adapting some other first contact story; science fiction is just loaded with ‘em, most more deserving of a comic adaptation than this.

The art by Eisma is pretty good but rarely thrills. He seems at his strongest when he gets to draw weird creatures, like visiting aliens and escaped lab experiments. Other times, his storytelling is way too obvious, such as when 102 tells the others, "let's just hope none of us has to take the cyanide way out" and Eisma actually draws the leader taking out his cyanide capsule and holding it up for them to see, as if they otherwise won't understand what he's talking about. Overall, the art loses a lot of the detail and becomes more basic looking towards the end, as if he was taking his time early on but then later rushed for whatever reason.

Serpo is by no means bad, in fact I would say it's very-- competent. I suppose that's damning with faint praise, but really it's not like I threw the book down in disgust. Maybe I expect too much sometimes, but I was hoping for something a bit more original, imaginative and absorbing. I would give this book a 6.5.

Frank Frazetta's Creatures

I might as well confess right up front that I have a soft spot for anything that has to do with Teddy Roosevelt, who is a local hero in my hometown of Oyster Bay, New York. Roosevelt resided there during his presidency, raised his family there, and is buried there as well. Growing up there, you can’t escape his influence: I attended Theodore Roosevelt Elementary school, the local park and bird sanctuary are named after him as well, one of our fire departments adopted the name Rough Riders, and a handsome bust of TR adorns the front of our Town Hall. While there are other famous citizens with ties to the area, not even Billy Joel, Jackie “the Jokeman” Martling, or even Weiner Dog inspire a greater sense of local pride.

Yet even if I can put aside my obvious bias in the matter, I would still say that Frank Frazetta’s Creatures is an entertaining and amusing little one-shot. Rick Remender and Peter Bergting have concocted a wonderfully gonzo alternate universe where Roosevelt was not only a big game hunter, cavalry soldier, and respected statesman, but also an accomplished ghostbuster, valiantly engaging supernatural menaces with his secret team of “Dark Riders” (which includes among its membership SF author Edgar Rice Burroughs). Through 25 pages of nearly non-stop action, Teddy keeps a stiff upper lip as he plows through disgruntled demigods, giant snakes, savage apes, and even a legion of ornery pint-sized Martian invaders.

If this brew of action, humor and the supernatural puts you in mind of the Hellboy universe as concocted by Mike Mignola, I’m not sure that’s a comparison that Remender and Bergting would shy away from. Bergting’s shadowy and simplified pencils even remind me of the style employed by Mignola and other artists who draw in his books. In addition to Roosevelt’s natural talents, Remender has also armed the Prez with a mystic gem that grants him superpowers, as well as a funky powerpack and monster blasters. As is often the case with Hellboy, TR meets each outrageous challenge with fisticuffs and gunplay. Unfortunately, because the tone of the story is so light, there’s a distinct lack of jeopardy to the combat; there’s no creature our hero encounters that he can’t blast apart.

By the way, exactly what Frank Frazetta has to do with any of this is not at all clear to me. My guess is that he simply okayed the use of his name and the reprinting of his painting for the cover and otherwise his involvement extends to cashing the check. I assume that Remender’s assignment was to extrapolate a story out of what was depicted in the painting, but if so he has a hell of an imagination. Studying that painting, I never would’ve guessed that the hunter with his back to the viewer was Theodore Roosevelt! Actually, Bergting’s great variant cover has a more accurate depiction of the prez-on-martian wackiness to be found within.

Frank Frazetta’s Creatures is light and fun and earns a 7/10 from this appreciative reader. A one-shot is the perfect format for this concept, as I suspect turning this premise into a series would kill the joke pretty quick. However, if Remender and Mignola were ever to join forces to have Teddy Roosevelt fight alongside the Amazing Screw-On Head, count me in!

Pilot Season: The Core

Top Cow has come up with an ingenious way to test the waters on new book ideas to see if they will fly. Much as the TV networks each year sanction the creation of pilot episodes of prospective new shows to gauge how they might look and whether they will succeed, Top Cow has created a "Pilot Season" of their own, in which they release 6 one-shots that could potentially become an ongoing series if the demand is high enough. In this contest, fans vote in a poll posted on a special MySpace page, and the top two vote getters will be rewarded with a shot at a monthly series. Neat idea, isn't it?

Last year's two winners were both superhero books, but this year there is one straight-up sci-fi nominee, and that's Jonathan Hickman and Kenneth Rocafort's The Core. Packed jammed-tight into 24 slick pages is a little bit of everything I like to see in my space operas: politics, intrigue, combat, and groovy alien races. A lot happens in this issue, but let's face it: it's the creators' big shot at trying to land an ongoing gig, and they lay out their scenario at a breakneck pace. Too bad that, as I post this, voting is 24 hours away from closing, and this book is only in fourth place!

The Core of the title refers, quite literally, to the center of the universe, where populated worlds are more closely packed together and the home of several ancient coalitions which over the millennia have steadily expanded outward. After so much passage of time, the inner worlds of the Core are low on resources, making them more desperate for new member worlds as they branch out. As the story opens, Earth has only recently been accepted into the Dahiba Federation, but the alliance is an uneasy one because humanity is making many demands which the Dahiba resent but grudgingly put up with for access to the Sol system’s resources.

Enter our POV character Asimov Dedeken (great name, huh?), the first human to be accepted into Red Sector, which is the Federation's religion-tinged special ops forces. We are along for the ride for Asimov's baptism of fire, joining four other ops for a rescue mission to recover a captive ambassador taken hostage by separatists, most likely on the orders of the Federation's foes, the Saano Solidarity. Amidst the action, Asimov absorbs more and more about the political makeup of the Core, and what exactly he has gotten himself into. He learns about the world that Hickman and Rocafort have devised even as we do. The book ends with a bit of a twist that ensures our hero is in for a big-time moral dilemma in the days ahead.

Hickman and Rocafort have crafted a universe that seems like a cool place to spend some time. Rocafort is a good imaginative penciller, and the pages are colored to give them a painted look. In terms of design, the alien creatures, ships and interiors are all eye-catching, and it's fun to pore over the pages and really take a look around. Hickman's writing is mostly solid; sure there's a lot of infodump but, again, they have just the one issue to lay out the book's premise. I could gripe about a few punctuation errors and odd sentence structures, but shouldn't an eagle-eyed editor have caught those?

I liked The Core quite a bit, I would rate it a 8/10. I would love to see more of it. Unfortunately, as I said, the book is not a frontrunner, and voting closes at the end of the day. Not sure why the deadline had to be quite this soon, I only got my copy from Westfield about a week ago. If the book sounds at all good to you, you don't need to take my word for it, as the entire issue is posted for free up at Newsarama. If you agree that we need to go back to the Core, head on over to the Pilot Season page and vote. Probably a last minute hail mary is too little too late to disrupt a poll that has been going on for a month, but it's worth a shot!