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I feel like I should do some reading project for the new thread, but I don't have any idea what. Maybe the output of some short-lived third tier superhero line..
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Sep 28, 2021 22:37
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Skwirl posted:Malibu? I actually thought about that, but I don't want to bring up a pedophile constantly. I think I have a fun, short option, though. I was tempted to do the New Universe, but I've... er... read all of those before...
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Sep 29, 2021 00:49
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Skwirl posted:Do an old Vertigo title that isn't Swamp Thing, Sandman, Lucifer or Hellblazer. Right neighborhood for my idea, but much, much lower quality.
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Sep 29, 2021 01:29
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How Wonderful! posted:So, a little while ago I put my big Onslaught read on hold, in large part because I was having enough fun with it that I decided to loop back all the way and read every single mutant and mutant-adjacent comic put out by Marvel since 1963. It has taken me this far to get to 1985, right on the doorstep of Secret Wars II, and I've made the potentially misguided decision to just go ahead and read every Secret Wars II tie-in, if nothing else as a way to get a taste for everything else going on in Marvel outside of the stuff I'm following. I think it's obvious that I absolutely love deep dives into the odder parts of comics.
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Sep 30, 2021 18:13
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Let me take you back to a simpler time, the early 1990's. Comic books were booming and everyone wanted to cash in. Smaller publishers were starting up superhero lines that would quickly sputter and die out. Larger publishers were trying to bully everyone else off the shelves by flooding the market with comics. But what if one of those big companies were to make their own short lived superhero line? Well, okay, they both did in a few different forms. But given the cooling weather and the presence of pumpkin spice cheerios, it's time to send a chill up your spine with the master of horror's own line of extra-edgy superhero books. And how do you know it's edgy? Well, the title of the line tells you that! I give you Clive Barker's Razorline: A Bad Idea in Eleven-ish Parts Don't know it? Well, there's a good reason for that. This is one of those situations where a comic company, Marvel in this case, got in touch with someone famous and had them suggest a few characters, then handed them off to some third-stringers (though there's at least one name in there so far who would go on to bigger and better things). It's a formula that has never worked and yet it keeps happening. The line consisted of four comics and most of them ran for nine issues. One fell short of even that mark. There's also a couple of specials and the subject of this post: a discount book with a short story based on each comic that was intended to launch the line. Brief aside here, someone I know was at the retailer summit where Marvel introduced Razorline with Clive Barker and Stan Lee on stage at the same time. Apparently Barker told some crude sex jokes about the Fantastic Four which had Lee rolling. Now I'll kick this off with Razorline: First Cut. Inside the cover is a brief introduction by Barker who assures us that this is only the beginning and many more series will be part of the line. The setting is the "Decamundi", a group of ten worlds. A bit more generic stuff about how great comics are and how great Razorline is and he's out. (The couple of hundred words Barker wrote can be found at his website if you really want to read it for some reason. I found it because I wasn't sure if Decamundi was a thing he was pulling from his other works.) Hokum and Hex - I'm glad the text introduction to this one told me it was supposed to be a comedy because I would have never gotten that from the story. Some warrior on a planet dedicated to war has snuck into a cathedral to watch the god of the world sacrifice some guy to himself in preparation for the invasion of the earth. The god is anti-abortion and thinks women belong in the kitchen, so you know where you're supposed to stand with him. After the beheading and the grandiose speech about invading the earth, the guy who snuck in drops his banana peel on the floor and the god slips on it. Rather than kill the person who was caught, they're placed at the vanguard of the invasion force. The end. So, the main character doesn't appear in the story that's supposed to be selling me on getting his comic. Not a good start. This one is written by Frank Lovece and drawn by Anthony Williams and I am not looking forward to a "funny" book when the writer thinks this is the height of comedy. Saint Sinner - A monk is working on an illuminated manuscript telling the story of Saint Sinner. He was possessed by a demon that turned him into a serial killer, then the demon made him kill an angel and that act bound both the angel and demon permanently to him. Now Saint Sinner goes around being the guy in between good and evil. The monk wasn't a monk, though, just a guy in a bathrobe who was forging a manuscript to hand of to some kind of spirit who then summons Saint Sinner through a television in order to pay the man for his work. He wants to be famous and Saint Sinner goes, "Okay, you die in a fire now and that'll make your art well known. Sucks to be you." Only more portentous because that's the kind of story this is. This one is a bit more promising. Okay, I need more than warmed over Twilight Zone twists, but it's got a Vertigo-ish premise that could be used for some interesting things. Elaine Lee wrote it and she seems to be fine from this sample, but the stand out here is Max Douglas on the art where he seems to be mixing electronic media and traditional art. It actually looks pretty cool, especially for a 1993 comic. Fingers crossed for this one to be interesting. Hyperkind - A woman in some very 90's armor fights a lizard alien who is mad that she has powers that belong to lizard aliens. Her "powers" seem to be firing a big gun out of her armor, so I don't know what he's talking about there. There's a guy who's dying but has been trying to hand out powers. The woman can't take on the lizard alien, but then two more characters show up: a guy who is just the Vision and a scaly guy in a biker outfit who has swords for hands. Together they will fight the lizard alien. The end. So pretty much no set up, no reason to care, and even the action looks flat. The art is by Paris Cullins who seems to be pulling a Herb Trimpe and going full 90's; it looks terrible compared to his usual art. The story is by Fred Burke who in the text piece after the "story" says that Hyperkind are "Clinton-era superheroes" which does not give me a lot of hope. Ectokid - Oh god, he's a Cajun thief. One page and I'm already thinking more fondly of Gambit. Our thief is Dex and he's left New Orleans to go meet a voodoo woman in a swamp. He tells her about how he suddenly found himself in a warped version of New Orleans where he met a dead serial murderer who tried to kill him. In the end, he thinks it must have been a dream. But meanwhile, two sinister figures are plotting against him. James Robinson wrote this one and while it's the most coherent story I got out of this book, it also makes me think that Ectokid the comic is going to be pretty generic. The character who can walk between two worlds and see the dead was a pretty common fantasy trope already. Steve Skroce penciled this one and it was fine. So I've got one book I'm pretty hopeful for and three that have me worried. The ten worlds premise seems to only be used in one of the comics since Ectokid is seeing dead people instead of another planet. Overall, this would not have me interested enough to buy any of these series which is a bad sign since it's a promotional book. Next time, I get some foil embossed #1s! I'm sure they'll be worth a ton someday!
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Oct 1, 2021 04:23
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Razorline Retrospective #2: #1s Just so you know, all of these are foil embossed because we're going pure 90s! Hokum & Hex #1 quote:There are women in Manhattan. Wow is this badly written. Trey is a really lovely stand-up comic. I'm pretty sure we're supposed to find him funny and he's just down on his luck, but he's really unfunny. Anyway, his girlfriend leaves him and he's attacked by monsters sent by a god of another dimension because Trey is the designated guardian of the earthrealm. He's gained the ability to unconsciously transform unliving things in ways that make emotional sense to him, like a ring choking people or a rubber chicken becoming a chicken monster. Trey beats the monsters through the use of magicians tricks turned deadly. He also picks up an assistant from another dimension who he makes look like his ex-girlfriend. Then they head off to the Empire State Building because that's where he threw a bunch of tarot cards from the day before and tarot cards can act as gateways between worlds as long as Roger Zelazny's lawyers don't know about it. Another monster attacks and throws him off the building. There really is nothing worse than unfunny comedy. It's like having your teeth pulled. And the overwrought narration in this book doesn't help either. Unless something big changes, this one is going to be pretty much unreadable. Saint Sinner #1 The very first thing in this issue is recommendation of what music to listen to as you read the comic. And I mean at the top of page one. It's N.W.O.'s Ministry, FWIW. I did not take their recommendation. Phillip is a jerk kid who was exploring a sewer while carrying a flaming torch when he started hearing voices telling him to do things. He's been possessed by a demon and he kills his friends, kills some cheerleaders, but killing his parents is a step too far. So Phillis throws himself off a pier and tries to drown. He's pulled from the water by a woman and Phillip kills her too, but she was an angel and her essence joins the demon in his head. Then he's abducted by the demon's brothers and take him to hell (called the Amen! complete with exclamation point) where he's tortured for years trying to get the demon out. Then he leads a jailbreak of the strange prisoners of hell. This really feels like second tier early Vertigo. Trying way too hard to be edgy, characters who you have to spend way too much time trying to sort out their speach patterns and lettering. It's not bad, it's just why read this when any of the Vertigo books already exist. I like the art quite a bit, though. I am hoping that this one settles down now that the origin is done with. I'm not sure what the point of the book is, yet. So far all we have is a character. What I want from the next issue is to give the book a direction. Hyperkind #1 The first few pages here are literally the exact same pages that were in the preview comic. Then it jumps back to give me an origin for the team but no real understanding of who the characters are or what they can do. There's a homeless man with golden ankhs who's actually a forgotten superhero and he stumbles across Lisa who dresses like it's 1985 and just broke up with her suit wearing boyfriend Kenny because he wanted an open relationship with a punk girl, Dyan. There's also a skater guy who's just hanging around with them, too, who I'm not sure got named in the comic. Anyway, an old enemy finds the forgotten hero and he sends Lisa off with a key to the lab where he keeps his superhero making machines. She climbs in one to be given a metal skeleton and gets 90's armor. The rest of the group followed her and when the lizard alien attacks, they all get into the superhero making machines, too. It feels like a lot pages where made but nothing really happened in them. I don't have any clue who any of these people are after this first issue which is supposed to be the launch of a new superhero team. Obviously they're setting up the team to fight amongst themselves a lot, but it's really hard to care. Ectokid #1 Tom is robbing hotel rooms in New Orleans when he's seduced by three women. Before they get it on, he slips into another world where he sees them as monsters. Fleeing, they pursue along with a whole host of creatures. Tom is cornered only to be saved by Cyrano de Bergerac. Some mysterious guys are mad that Tom has slipped through their fingers again and this time they're going to get serious. Again. Actually, this one was the most readable of the four comics this time. It's slight, but it told a story and I understood what was happening even though the main character didn't really get it yet. I also really like the art for the ghost world stuff; it shifts from a clean, normal style to exaggerated and cartoony. This one isn't great, but it's fine.
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Oct 4, 2021 04:28
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Continuing my terrible October reading with Clive Barker's Razorline Part 3 Hyperkin #2 - The lizard guy they've been fighting since the preview has finally been given a name: Thermakk. Ah, 90's character names; they hold up even worse than comic book names normally do. We also get the superhero name for one of the characters on page four. Logix is the guy who looks just like the Vision only with more circuitry. In the thirty seconds he's been a robot, he's also starting thinking things like "it's almost beyond even my ability to comprehend!" Oh, and they just know what each other are called now. The last team member emerges from her super power pod and it turned her from a punk worm with short, dark hair into a blonde centerfold who gets a splash page so readers can see how hot she is. Then Thermakk abducts the other female team member so the fight can go to another location, then it moves to yet another location. Thermakk reveals that he just wants their powers back because they're not supposed to have them and bad things can happen, but he's also a violent lizard man on a rampage so it's not like anyone is going to listen to him. Eventually he just runs off vowing to return and the team settles in to give you the roster. Armata is the woman in 90's armor with big guns on her hands. Logix looks just like the Vision and has the power to do things with machines. Amokk is the guy with swords for hands and he was permitted five seconds to have a moment about it ("I'll never play guitar again with these!" Yeah, I'd worry about going to the bathroom, myself). Bliss is the designated sexy woman and she makes illusions. This book is a prime example of the terrible new superhero team books of the 90's. Some people who have no reason to be together, terrible names, vaguely defined abilities for both the heroes and the villains, writing where you were supposed to know all the back story because you bought the trading cards. They desperately wanted to be the X-Men but were all so lazy about it. Ectokid #2 - And now we're getting a proper premise for the book. Dex has realized that he sees the spirit world out of one eye and the living world out of the other, so he has an eyepatch that he switches between them. He thinks his mother knows what is happening to him and why people are hunting him, so he goes to talk with her at an insane asylum. There he gets the story that she summoned a ghost and they wound up loving leading to him. Also, his ghostly father was building a superscience machine when he was murdered but hid the machine and that's probably why Dex is being hunted. There's a perfunctory fight and then we see how the people after him are closing in. This one is actually improving. It's by James Robinson so it's not a surprise that it's turning out halfway decent. Not brilliant, but perfectly enjoyable and I'm kind of hoping that there's some kind of resolution to the story for this one when we reach the end. Hokum & Hex #2 - When last we left failed comedian with the power to transform props Trip, he had been thrown from the top of the Empire State Building. He survives by phasing through the ground until he came to rest in a cavern deep below Manhattan. Then after getting back to the surface, he talks to his best friend who goes on to roast him as part of a "comedy" set. Then aliens attack and Trip can't figure out his powers are "gag" based, so his friend gets hurt in the attack. Now this one continues to be painfully unfunny. An entire page representing a really lovely set. There's other subplots but none of them really matter since I doubt they're going anywhere. This comic is just a slog to read. Saint Sinner #2 - Phillip has returned from hell and it's been nine years for him and one day for everyone else. While the other things he released from hell hang out in a sewer and dispose of some bodies, Phillip returns to his home. There he uses his power to age and de-age things to cure his grandfather's Alzheimer's, kill his family dog, and freak out his parents. Then the police show up to ask him some questions and when Phil's touch burns the detective, the cops open fire with their pistols and riddle his body with tranquillizer darts. While nonconscious, the demon prods Phillip to kill his younger self and he refuses. Meanwhile, the hell escapees make their own universe. Phillip wakes up in a padded cell. He escapes and heads off to the new world. I still don't know what this book is about, but it does seem wrapped up in multiple layers of obfuscation. You've got five major characters where you have to put in effort to figure out what they're saying. The escapees from Hell seem like they're the supporting cast but I still don't get them; there's a guy made of static, a patchwork woman, and "bull baby" which is a seven foot tall baby with horns. For what should have been an emotionally important scene, Phillip doesn't really interact with his parents at all. And then the detective who was investigating the murders Phillip did while possessed thinks he might be a "dark saint" for absolutely no reason. I thought the comic might find its feet with the set up done away with in the first issue, but this issue was also just rushing through setting up the premise of the book.
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Oct 6, 2021 12:01
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Clive Barker's Razorline Part 4 I wound up gapping due to other obligations taking up time and then Metroid: Dread (but not Dredd). Still, I want to get through these books in October as that it the only month in which you are legally allowed to read Clive Barker comics. (Ever read the Hellraiser series? That was an odd one and published by Marvel, too!) Saint Sinner #3 - You know what this comic needed? Another origin story. This time it's the origin of the demon and angel living in the saint's head. Each of them existed in a trinity being (but not the same trinity being). The saint's buddy accidentally killed one-third of the demon's trinity allowing all the bad aspects of it to escape and run wild. The angel had the other two aspects of her trinity stripped away so she could get to earth and find the demon. That's why when they got into the saint's head, they got stuck there. The static guy is also a time travelers so he meets himself and creates a time loop and I'm not sure which one was the past one and which was the future one since the one referred to in the future tense was the one in the present of the comic, but the past one got things from the future to give to the present one and this is worse than time travel stories usually are. Either way, when they escaped from hell a few issues ago they let a monster out so he tells the saint about it and they decide to go off and fix this. Three issues in and it's still all set up. And not interesting set up, either. I still don't know what this comic is about other than being warmed over Vertigo. Hokum and Hex #3 - My thoughts going in, "Please, no more painfully unfunny comedy." It starts with an evil looking jack-in-the-box doing what should be catch-up but it's more like explaining to me what was going on in the last issue. Apparently Jack's abilities made a tank explode and shrapnel from that killed one of his comedian buddies. Or didn't kill her since she's in the hospital later. Also it says she took the injury in her chest and in the hospital she has a head wound. I'm just going to say that the words and pictures don't really match up well in this comic. Then we're introduced to Wrath, a female bounty hunter who looks like something Rob Liefeld would reject for being a crappy design. After taking down some generic thugs, she's offered the job of capturing Jack by a media company who want to put him on television. She'll do it for free because she likes the challenge but when her employer reminds her that they need him alive, she says that as a bounty hunter she'll kill him. Jack meanwhile is doing the "I never asked for these powers" angst poo poo that we've seen a thousand times. He gets attacked by Fury who takes time in the fight to give us the "As a woman, I am extra tough but nobody every let me be extra tough grr..." thing that idiots used to think was feminist. Jack refuses to use his abilities in the fight because it somehow proves that he's in control of his own destiny. Massive property damage ensues and then when the fight is over, an army of cops show up. This book is still trying to be funny and is still just painful. Jack's powers are that he can do anything which gives him the Green Lantern problem of "You can do anything and this is what you chose?" Hyperkind #3 - We start out getting some background on these characters. Armata's a student and is researching the superhero team who had the powers before them. Bliss is a stripper whose boss is also her crack dealer; truly a hero for the Clinton era. Amokk has found a golden age comic based on that hero team and decides to smuggle some pot in order to afford it. Logix almost accidentally deletes the Internet because it couldn't find anything online about the team. The investigations lead to Paragon Studios whose evil chairperson knows about the superheroes and is covering it up. Meanwhile, Bliss can see black blobs draining people's souls. She finds out that attacking them makes the blobs visible to others, so she does that and it turns into a giant black blobby baby that likes to eat superheroes. The team gathers and then immediately comes to the conclusion that the way to beat it is to do nothing. They do and the blob baby dies. Well, at least this book has a plot. It's also doing 90's comics about as hard as you can 90's comics without going full Image. These are some unlikable characters and the book does not make me want to read any more about them. Ectokid #3 - Dex is checking out the ghostworld of New Orleans when he's tackled by Jindrak, a guy who was a friend of his missing father's and who knows enough to get Dex off the street and out of sight. They're already being hunted by a ghost witch. While they're hanging out, another one of Dex's father's friends shows up: Edgar Allan Poe. He's brought along some more friends including Cyrano de Bergerac. One of the characters introduced three panels before turns out to be a traitor and snatches away a letter from Dex's father. Then the ghost witch and her legion shows up. Fortunately, Poe is a better fighter than you'd expect from a sickly writer who died of alcoholism. However, Jindrak gets killed and when you get killed in ghostworld, some nasty things called etherites show up to wipe everyone in the vicinity out. Which they do and the cliffhanger is that everybody including Dex are just gone. Okay, I can do without shoving all of the historical figures in, and the fight scene is particularly incoherent in terms of art. They're in a room, then they're fighting on steps and holding back the hoard, then they've gotten away from the hoard onto a roof, then the hoard is back and around them and there's no transition between any of this. So far, this is the Razorline comic with the most going on and I actually kind of want an answer to what the deal is with the etherites. I know I probably won't get it, but I think there's a chance for me to find out why a ghost getting killed prompts this overwhelming response.
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Oct 12, 2021 05:16
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muscles like this! posted:So The Mads (Frank Conniff and Trace Beaulieu) did a riff of an old Captain Marvel serial from the 40s and being so old it has some weird stuff. Like Captain Marvel manning a machine gun and shooting a group of bad guys who were running away. Not exactly his most heroic moment. I think you'll find that the wisdom of a bronze age king told him it was perfectly okay to do that.
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Oct 13, 2021 02:38
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Clive Barker's Razorline Part 5 I spotted something in a next issue blurb last time that made me nervous. One of these comics kicks off the Razorline crossover. So that'll be "fun". Ectokid #4 - Firing off with the comic that's actually okay. The weird guys that vaporized Dex last issue sent him back to his own body which made me go, "That's not how this comic works." Turns out we've had a writer switch. James Robinson is off the book and the person is credited as "Larry Wachowski", which would be Lana Wachowski to use her proper name. She had written for Marvel's Hellraiser series before this and this would be right before her sister and her started directing movies. Anyway, it means that nothing matches up to the previous issues. Now Dex can control his ectoplasm and hit people with it. He pulled a note from his father out of the ghost world when he was sent back with directions on how to locate his father. Then he goes off to meet some of his friends at his favorite strip club, but everyone there has been massacred. A woman he knew stuck around after death to let him know that their killers, some bad guys who have been subplotting around for the past few issues, know about Dex's mother and are going after her next. He heads to the mental institution where there's a fight, they get away with his mom, and then use her to force him to locate Dex's father. Not a good sign when a book completely flips after three issues. Hokum & Hex #4 - Trip is busted by the police because of the property damage incurred in the fight last issue, all of which was done by super bounty hunter Wrath. Trip restrained her by turning her costume to metal, but since it was basically a strapless bathing suit I don't really see how that was restraints. Anyway, he agrees to turn it back and for some reason she decides to instantly attack him in front of all the police. So her turns her costume into plastic wrap. Ho ho ho  , he stripped a woman naked in public. loving 90's.This comic gets way more hosed up that that, too. As Trip is being booked, an old man suddenly remembers that he was a superhero: Z-Man. He had the ability to fire eye beams that disintegrated things. A media mogul is also watching and he's mad because he's spent decades erasing superheroes from the public consciousness and it's unraveling. And an rock monster with a goat skull head and the ability to control time appears and is out for revenge. The old superhero turns up at Trip's arraignment and disintegrates a cop. Then we get his backstory where he was the sidekick to Paxis, the old hero team at the center of Hyperkind. One time when he saved their lives, they returned the favor by liberating a concentration camp. So superbeings with the power to stop the Holocausts only liberated one camp because they owed a Jewish kid a favor. gently caress those assholes and gently caress Frank Lovece for thinking this was a heroic action. Anyway, he got Dr. Manhattaned into superpowers, which seems out of place since so far all of the superpowers in these books have been mystical in nature, but this guy is getting a silver age origin. Then he went on to be a hero until he accidentally killed another member of Paxis. After relating this, skull-face kicks in the door and starts using his time power to kill Z-Man over and over again. Trip just crushes the skull guy anticlimactically. Z-Man is dead, but when he died the police officer he just disintegrated comes back which would imply that everything Z-Man disintegrated should have come back too. And then we're left on a cliffhanger as Trip is summoned to host Friday Night Live. Hyperkind #4 - The media mogul is our next big villain as he has a personal grudge against superheroes and wiped them all out last time. He also controls all media, murders someone for running a news report on the Hyperkind, murders another employee for figuring out that he has mind control gas, puts a public challenge out to Hyperkind to lure them into a trap, then has a public battle between his private army and the superheroes. They all wind up captured, the end. The rest of the book is the Hyperkind doing the superhero team fighting among themselves which you know makes them very relatable. Or come across as a giant pack of assholes that you wouldn't want to read about. One of those two. Saint Sinner #4 - Four issues in and we have a plot! SS has been summoned back to earth by people praying over a tentacle monster killing people in the river. He's the one who let that monster out of hell, so he has to deal with it. Also, there's an ad man who doesn't want to be evil, though the book for some reason thinks you can be in advertising and not be evil. His boss wants to make commercials that provoke fear in order to get people to buy things and their newest commercial is going to involve a tentacle monster in the river. The boss is being possessed by other demons who were trying to lure Saint Sinner into a trap. Once there, he finds the monster, opens a portal to hell that it goes through an explodes, and the human soul gets pulled out of Saint Sinner's body leaving the angel and demon behind. This is the toughest book to read because they still screw around with the format in "artistic" ways that make it nearly impossible to figure out what's going on or read the text. It's a real headache of a book.
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Oct 14, 2021 05:10
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CopywrightMMXI posted:I recently learned that Captain Marvel had an African American sidekick named Steamboat, and the depiction was considered racist even by the standards of the early 40s. Comics with steamboat have not been collected, as far as I’m aware. He did though I don't know if I'd say Steamboat was racist by the standards of the 40's. He was very much a minstrel show character and an unfortunately small number people at the time were pointing out the racism in those. On the golden age racism scale, Steamboat is about a 7, as racist as you can get and still be a "positive" portrayal. Some comics with him have been collected. There was a Monster Society of Evil collection a long time ago (like the 80s or 90s) and he was in that story. I don't remember seeing him in the Shazan Archives I have, though I don't have the complete set...
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Oct 14, 2021 17:06
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Clive Barker's Razorline Part 6 Whew. Over halfway there. Taking stock at this point, these are generally bad comics. Ectokid started out okay, but that was the only one. The thing is, they're not bad comics in a "You've got to check this poo poo out!" way, they're bad comics in the "So you really don't have any interesting ideas?" way. I'm seeing it through to the end because I doubt anybody has cared to read these books in over twenty years and they're a forgotten part of Marvel comics, but I was hoping for more crazy flailing when started this read. Anyway, crossover month! Not line wide, but Hyperkind crosses over with Hokum and Hex while Saint Sinner crosses over with Ectokid. Hyperkind #5 - When last we left the angry superteens who fought amongst themselves more than actual threats, they had been captured by the evil media mogul who wanted to erase superheroes. And he's decided to explain his evil plan to them before he kills them. No, that's actually what he says. In the extended flashback that makes up the bulk of the issue we find out that the lizardman was the leader of the original superhero team. Also the mogul killed almost all of the previous heroes in the dumbest ways possible. "Hey guy who omniscience powers.... have you ever tried knowing everything?" "Hey logic brain woman, have you considered the fact that half your team vanishing suddenly might mean that you should give up?" Also, he made people forget about superheroes with mind control gas he spread around the world. After giving our heroes all of the backstory, the new logic brain guy cuts a deal to give the mogul the omniscience power in exchange for letting them go. It was a trick, though, and he uses the mind control gas to make the mogul forget about capturing them. But here comes Trip from Hokum & Hex... Hokum & Hex #5 - Trip is rehearsing for Friday Night Live and intentionally blowing his lines because his powers aren't working and he doesn't want to try to use them on television. The old wizard who looks like his ex-girlfriend comes up with a plan to talk to the god that gave him his powers and in that conversation we learn that Trip's powers to turn anything into anything work best on simple things that he understands or has a connection to. Kind of an arbitrary kryptonite, but okay. Meanwhile, the evil god is making his own supervillain which he calls "Bloodshed" because it's the 90's. Trip heads out to a strip club where the Hyperkind member who makes illusions is dancing. She winds up looking like his ex-girlfriend for a moment and that sets off a heroes have a misunderstanding and start fighting scene. Once that's over with, they come up with a plan to deal with the media mogul who's erasing people's memories of superheroes. On Friday Night Live, Trip is going to turn things into statues of superheroes and then the new superheroes will crash the show. Just before he does that, some new supervillains attack and it's to be continued in Hyperkind #6. I had to mention that this comic had a joke about "P. C. culture" just so you know how lovely it is. Ectokid #5 - Part one of "Sir Sigmoid's Arcadia" so this is a proper crossover storyline. Dex is astral projecting himself to ghost world again even though that's not how his powers worked in the first three issues. Once there, he meets a worm that crawls in his ear and takes over his brain. But this Mr. Mind wannabe just sends him to an evil carnival where people pay ectoplasmic coins that they generate from themselves to play the games. Naturally the games involve inflicting violence on small creatures who claim to be other people who came to the carnival. While there, Dex meets Phil, the human third of Saint Sinner who got ripped out of the other two in his own book last month. The two hit it off and wind up in cages before Sigmoid, the demon running the carnival. Dex agrees to give him lots of ectoplasm for letting Phil go. Then after Sigmoid engorges himself on Dex's milky white goo, Dex explodes it out of him since he can control his ectoplasm like that. As the two half-dead humans run off, Sigmoid pulls himself together and swears revenge. There's a lot of word balloons in this issue that don't have tails and the speakers are having their conversation in the distant background. It makes it a challenge to understand the comic a lot of the time. Hopefully this doesn't keep happening. Saint Sinner #5 - So that cliffhanger gets resolved fast. Page 1: Sigmoid is confronting the on the run pair. Page 2: Phil sucks his own coins out of Sigmoid. Page 3: Sigmoid explodes as all the children souls that he's eaten escape. Dex then heads back to his body, but Phil isn't willing to return because he's got an angel and demon at home waiting for him. Speaking of them, they're stumbling around the city unable to properly control the body. They get hit by a car, try to kill someone by giving them bad directions, and the demon decides he'll get free by killing the body. Back at the carnival, Phil meets a girl who happens to have that worm in her ear. She's sucking his soul out one piece at a time. But eventually the carnival is revealed to be the real demon. Phil realizes it only likes eating children and he's no longer a teenager because he spent a decade in hell. With that knowledge, his soul self ages and pulls back all the missing bits. The children that were eaten explode out of the carnival and every dead kid is happy. I'm actually surprised that this was a coherent issue of Saint Sinner. There was a story and I wasn't spending my entire time trying to parse bad lettering. The art isn't nearly as good, though. This is much more of a traditionally illustrated issue than the previous ones were.
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Oct 18, 2021 04:30
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Clive Barker's Razorline Part 7 Things are starting to wrap up for the Razorline. I think around now is when they had confirmation that the axe was coming down since things feel like they're moving toward conclusions. Ectokid #6 - It opens with frozen time rewinding itself as the art moves through the destruction and I find it impossible to not draw parallels with Wachowski's more famous work. Dex has met his father at the location that was arranged and while there he meets another pile of famous ghosts including James Dean and Janice Joplin. They're attacked by a troll loanshark who want's Dex's father's soul and a Mad Max style chase begins. It ends with the car exploding and everyone being blow to bits. Dex realizes he can just pull his ectoplasm back together, so he reconstitutes himself and heads back to the real world with instructions to find his father's corpse. While I'm getting really sick of the famous dead person name dropping, Ectokid is remaining the most readable of these series. It's perfectly fine comics, though not something I'd say is a must read. Since the issue was all action, there isn't a whole lot going on with it. Not even a lot of emotion with the reunion. Saint Sinner #6 - The art in this series has gone off a cliff. It's scratchy, poorly defined blobs now and I can't tell what's happening in the art at all. Phil is looking for his body so he can reunite with it before the demon can manage to kill it through neglect. Meanwhile, all of the demon's brothers are possessing a television producer and making him promote a televangelist. Phil reunites with his his body and then before he can return to his home pocket dimension which he's visited once in the series, he spots cops pursuing someone into a time slip that was created by Trip over in Hokum and Hex. A baby gets shot in the process, so Phil decides to take everybody to his pocket dimension. I feel like this comic was supposed to be about the pull of morality and creepy stories about a guy whose interaction with your life was both a blessing and a curse. I haven't seen that at all and Phil isn't tempted or cajoled by the demon; it just keeps going "Let's rape and murder!" and the angel goes "Let's help that person!" and Phil always chooses to help. Hyperkind #6 - Oh, god, they printed the issue sideways. Picking up from the previous issue of Hokum and Hex, Friday Night Live has just been attacked by supervillains. It's happening because the guy who has been covering up the existence of superpowers for decades "wants to make them look bad" on national television. The heroes are concerned that transforming themselves into superheroes in the place where they were going to transform themselves into superheroes five seconds later might reveal their secret identities and at this point I'm convinced that nobody is editing these comics. Our villains are
Hokum and Hex #6 - The storyline is Bloodshed, part one of four. Oh, and there's four issues left in the series. Trip is back in New York after his time fighting supervillains in LA. Gorkill, the leader of the alien invaders, has been hanging out in his apartment for a week waiting to kill him. There's a brief fight and then they start debating the nature of free will. Meanwhile, 90's villain Bloodshed is out to get Trip and bounty hunter Wrath is smashing up a meeting of people who remember superheroes exist. Trip and Gorkill have come to a kind of détente and Gorkill gives Trip some space medicine to help Trip's friend who was injured in the previous attack. But then Gorkill tries to kill Trip anyway since all he's really been convinced of is that Trip is a decent enough guy that he deserves a quick death. And that's when Bloodshed attacks and wants to kill both of them. This issue was actually a bit better than the previous ones mainly because he wasn't trying to be funny and managed to avoid coming across as being written by a real shithead. Maybe this will keep up for the rest of the series?
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Oct 22, 2021 05:15
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Clive Barker's Razorline Part 8 Hokum and Hex #7 - The cover promises me that Trip will die in this issue and there's no way I get that lucky. We left off with veiny assassin Bloodshed attacking Trip and Gorkill in Trip's apartment, Bloodshed being an amblitory circulatory system map. Since Bloodshed wants to kill both of them, they set aside their animosity and Trip goes on a weird political rant that doesn't fit in the story at all. Their enemy reveals his weakness: he's a physical being. No, seriously, his weakness is he can be touched. Trip and Gorkill flee and once they've left the bounty hunter Wrath smashes in. She's burned to death by Bloodshed in a way that's really making me start to wonder what is this comic's thing with violence toward women. Trip and Gorkill come back after forming a plan and Bloodshed has left to go attack the hospital where they're operating on Trip's friend. One more fight scene ensues and Bloodshot reveals that they were a serial killer and killed Trip's mother before the evil god turned him into a being of vaguely defined superpowers. With that pointless revelation out of the way, Bloodshot fries Trip and Gorkill. The next issue continues the fight so the cover did not live up to it's promise. Also, the letter column has a box announcing two more Razorline series: Mode Extreme and Wraithheart. Neither of these will be released. This series continues to be the blandest of the bland with just a hint of creepy 90's rear end in a top hat writing. But it could be worse, it could be... Hyperkind #7 - Armata is dead. Except she isn't, she's just a withered husk that's barely alive. Fortunately, Bliss just spouts a nursery rhyme about the previous super team and the follow the obvious clues in the nursery rhyme to reach a sanctuary, a super secret base is on a clear path in Griffith Park and behind a door that explodes if someone knocks on it wrong and somehow people haven't noticed it for forty years. Oh, and the rhyme reminds Bliss about how her father sexually abused her, so they just tossed that in for no good reason. At the sanctuary they meet a former member of the old superhero team and she helps them revive Bliss and everybody is happy. She also tells them all about the weaknesses of their powers which are pride, wrath, turning into a husk if you shoot too many bullets, and headaches. I don't even get how any of this was supposed to work. A nursery rhyme that just comes back to Bliss when her friend is dying and it's apparently a well known nursery rhyme that's really easy to figure out what it's pointing to. As a story, this just gives me a headache. Ectokid #7 - Dex is making a deal with the men who killed his father and kidnapped his mother to turn over the Macguffin they're looking for: a device that everyone thinks opens a door between ghostworld and the living world. The killers torture his mother by shaving her head and then putting her in a nun's habit and bondage gear. I'll give Wochowski this, she got the Clive Barker part down. The evil church that wants it gather to wait for news of the Macguffin; we hadn't been introduced to them yet but they're apparently the big villains. At the graveyard selected for the turnover, Dex arrived in ghost form. He tells the killers what they wanted to know, and then they're going to kill his mother anyway. Dex jumps inside his body and the two of them start fighting. The issue ends with a stand-off with the killer's left hand holding a gun to his own head and his right hand holding a gun to his mother's and me going, "If these books were this clever all the time, they wouldn't be completely forgotten." Yeah, Ectokid continues to be the only one that's interesting and this issue was better than what we had been seeing before. I want to know where this is going now. Saint Sinner #7 - I don't even know how to describe this one. We left off with Saint Sinner pulling a cab full of people to bring a baby who had been shot into his pocket universe to try to save its life. Instead of getting there, they wind up in a void reachable by people who are half dead. According to the ghost of a girl who is there and has a hoop that connects worlds, everyone in the cab is half dead but a lot of them are real stretches (being upset over your kid being shot is not "half dead"). Then the baby gets snatched up by someone who is all dead. Sinner is too alive to follow, so Sinner regresses the drug dealer who shot the baby back to infancy, then they send a kid with cancer who happened to be in the cab after the kidnapped baby with the drug dealer baby. The kid gets the shot baby back, so Sinner heals his cancer. Then they go back to the real world and just drive to a hospital. Finally, there's a one page epilogue telling us that Saint Sinner was cool but now it's over. The letter column mentions the book as being a victim of "the glut of '93". And that's it, the comic is canceled. This one had promise at the start when it looked like it would be kind of Twilight Zone-ish. Then they spent four issues on an origin story that didn't matter, was packed with unreadable dialogue, lost the kind of interesting art, and was just a trainwreck. I don't know if being incomprehensible makes it better or worse than some of these other books, though.
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Oct 24, 2021 04:12
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Clive Barker's Razorline Part 9 I'm down to three series and things are starting to wrap up. Ectokid #8 - I'm letting myself start with the one book here that I'm enjoying. We left off with Dex shooting his spirit into a killer who was holding a gun on his mother. Dex can't stay there, though, so his soul oozes back out. He left part of himself behind in the assassin, though, so the killer can't bring himself to shoot Dex's mother. Dex took a part of the assassin into his soul as well. Fortunately, his mother already knows how to handle spirits since she summoned Dex's father and made a half-ghost baby. At her lair, she pulls the bit off the assassin out of Dex and departs to prepare. Then the assassin shows up since he can now sense Dex and the two briefly fight. That's when Dex's mother comes back in psychic form looking like an angel and effortlessly beats down the assassin so Dex can recover his soul piece. Then she lets herself get shot. The killer escapes, mother and son immediately reunite, and Dex's mom heads off to ghost world intending to track down his father while Dex is out for revenge. Yeah, this book remains pretty solid. This is the kind of thing I want from a book all about a ghost adventurer. I'm actually disappointed it will end next issue. Hyperkind #8 - Okay, I had my fun. Now it's time for the two nearly unreadable books. In this 22 page comic, 2 pages are about our main characters, 1 page is a cliffhanger where the woman they met last issue is being threatened by a totally new villain, and the remaining 19 are all about former superhero Tempest. She was disintegrated by her own teammate in 1963 and he soul got merged into a gestalt being inside the computer at the Hyperkind base. She breaks out now, reconstitutes herself without memories, and wanders LA for a bit and having flashbacks. Eventually she's locked up by one of the people erasing the public's memories of superheroes and she's freed by the zaniaks who are monsters created by attempt at making new superheroes. Then she desides to attack our heroes. So the second to last issue and they spent it on exposition and nothing happening. Hokum & Hex #8 - Instead of dying when he was cooked by the villain last issue, Trip and Gorkill wind up in a virtual space created by the unused 90% of people's brains. Yeah. Anyway, it's the standard "tour of the subconscious" plot only we learn absolutely nothing new about Trip as he finds the will to live and fight back. Seriously, it's all backstory that's we've already received. Eventually there's a joke that definitely is not a joke and it makes Trip laugh and that was enough to revive him to go back and kill Bloodshed, the thing he fought that killed him. The closest thing that this issue gets to being clever is having Trip appear as a bad pencil sketch when he's going through some childhood stuff. It doesn't last or matter at all, though. And that's the best way to sum up this comic. It did try to remind me a lot that he's supposed to be a stand-up comedian even though this series has never had a joke in it.
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Oct 26, 2021 04:37
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Cliver Barker's Razorline Part 10 Ah, the final issues of these series. I get the impression that there's not going to be closure on any of them, but I guess we'll find out. Hokum & Hex #9 - Trip decides to fight the supervillain Bloodshed in the mindscape that links all of humanity. None of his attacks affect the walking circulatory system but I'm told that everything happening is very symbolic (it's not). In the real world, former enemy Gorkill is performing CPR on Trip to revive him and fighting with the real Bloodshed. The guy who acted as Trip's spiritual advisor and been totally irrelevant to the stories past the first issue or two receives a summons to cosmic court and gets snatched away. After talking with his dying friend, Trip realizes the way to be beat Bloodshed is to get to know the serial killer that was inside him. Pulling out his multiple personalities, Trip learns that Bloodshed was abused as a child and that explains everything. Bloodshed can't stand someone knowing his dark secret and tries to swallow Trip's soul but since Trip wasn't dead yet, Bloodshed eats himself. The end. This has been the worst one of the three series. It's nonsense like Hyperkind, but it's also trying to be funny and it really is not. It feels like the writer thinks he's a lot smarter than he actually is, particularly with these last two mindscape issues with a lot of imagery that's supposed to make you go, "Whoa!" and instead makes me go, "This is stupid." Hyperkind #9 - Boy, this series has been spinning up a lot of plot threads. Just plot thread on top of plot thread. Well, I'm sure the dozens of these that are waiting to be resolved will be handled in the next 22 pages. You know, right off the bat, "But you were killed decades ago!" is a stupid thing to say to a villain named "Lazurex". Who could have possibly foreseen that Lazurex could come back from the dead! Nobody, that's who! Lazurex the Robot Master was one of the old superteam's villains and he was in love with Logica the computer woman. She would give up her power and become the old woman at the citadel from a few issues ago. The heroes beat him by tricking him into french kissing a robot. Seriously. Our new Hyperkind are off in LA getting their supercar tagged and one of them says, "Why would they destroy something like this?" which I guess tells you the mindset of the writer. They know Logica is in trouble somehow (there's a lot of "they know something somehow" in this story) and head back to the citadel. In the fight with Lazurex, Logix goes into his cyborg brain and gets stuck. The only way to pull him out is to use the cosmic awareness power which someone took. They go to Venice Beach to find the holder of it and it turns out it's a dog who somehow operated the space tech capsule that turns people into superheroes. The furry takes Logix out of Lazurex's head and then they kill him again. The end. So, they managed to resolve one of the many storylines they started up and walked away from. The question for me here is how could there be nine issues of this comic and nothing happens? I mean, there were some fights but those didn't matter. What I got was a shitton of exposition and vaguely ominous threats. Cliched characters and the most 90's naming conventions ever were just icing on the cake. Ectokid #9 - No resolutions here, either. Ectokid ends on what would be a filler issue. Dex is woken up by a knock on his door. It's a woman in skintight PVC mourning garb and her dead husband has sent her to find him. She also has a jealous ex-boyfriend who threatens Dex and in a flashforward is going to shoot him. At the woman's place, he holds simultaneous conversations with her and the husband. He died by suicide when she was having an affair and her dreams of his death and keeping the bullet are inflicting spiritual harm on him. With their emotional catharsis reached, Dex and the woman go out for a drink where he ex-boyfriend bursts in and starts shooting. She pushes Dex out of the way and dies and Dex has to go on. It's a simple story, but it's really well told and I think that's Ectokid in a nutshell. If you were to read any of these comics, Ectokid is the one to check out. So that's the end of the series, but it's not the end of the story. About a year later there were two one shots for Ectokid and Hyperkind which might give them some kind of conclusion. I guess we'll find out!
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Oct 28, 2021 03:33
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Halloween night, time to close out my reading of the master of horror's personal comic book line. Clive Barker's Razorline Part 11 Hyperkind Unleashed #1 - The Hyperkind are in an alley fighting a generic street gang and Amokk happens to know one of the people there. They also find out that Bliss's boss at the strip club is behind the LA drug trade. One of the gang members dies in the crossfire and Armata has decided she wants to give up her powers. In their origin, the lizardman they fought wanted to take their powers back and use them elsewhere and they've since found out that the lizardman was the rightful owner of the powers and was handing them out for planetary defense. At the sanctuary with the former superhero, they learn that there's a space war going on right now and they don't have any superpowered people to help them. The team is divided on whether or not to give the powers back or keep them to protect the earth, but they decide to confront the lizardman anyway. After going to a monastery, through a portal, up a mountain, and to a different temple, they meet the lizardman and have another fight. This time they easily beat him and find out his tragic origin: he was tortured by his own people and sent out in the universe to give powers out in order to maintain a status quo of constant war. Nobody is satisfied with that answer so they go back to where they first got powers and plug themselves into the computer in order to chat with the spirit of the guy who gave the powers to them. Turns out he's a human supremacist who wants to make earth great again. He tries to steal the powers back but the Hyperkind do something, get snazzy new costumes, and destroy the equipment that could have given the powers back to the lizardman on their way out. Since they want to give the powers back, they agree to go with the lizardman back to his home planet, but the cosmically aware dog kicks the spaceship on their way out and it drops them off in the space warzone. To be continued... never. Because this is the last time anyone will ever do anything with these characters. There's a lot crammed into this one and I think it's basically three or four issues worth of scripts chopped up and shoved into the comic. I say that because the flow of the scenes and dialog often make no sense. There's also the problem that it's still spinning subplots around like there will be future issues. Hyperkind was the most generic, bland superhero team I could imagine. It might as well have been an Image book. None of the characters were interesting, all of their abilities were so poorly defined they might as well have been able to do anything, and they spent all of their time arguing with each other rather than developing interesting plots. It was a comic that kept having big plot revelations and then not actually doing anything with them. There's a guy who's mind controlled everyone into forgetting superheroes and... what? Why not fly around the city waving at people or conjuring illusions? There's a secret resistance that's freeing people's minds and... nothing. They just sit there providing exposition from time to time. There was an alien invasion in the middle of World War I and there isn't secret alien tech floating around or any consequences of that at all. This was a nothing comic, a vacant hole where a comic should have been. And that's worse than being truly awful because if a year from now you ask me what Hyperkind was about, I will have no clue. Ectokid Unleashed #1 - The best written of these comics does not have Lana Wachowski here to wrap up its story. On the other hand, it does have Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning so maybe it'll turn out to be good. The assassin that killed Dex's father have recovered the McGuffin that was shoved into a swamp with his corpse and it's an eight foot tall electronic apparatus that can open a door between the worlds of the living and the dead. The evil conspiracy who only showed up in the final issue of the series need Dex's father to operate it, so they kill the assassin so that he can go search the afterlife for him. First the assassin goes after Dex and says that getting killed like that made me change sides. He wants Dex's help rescuing his father and then everybody will go after the conspiracy together. Dex's dad was abducted several issues ago by a ghost mobster and the two rescuers head to his castle. On the way, the assassin gives some backstory: Dex's father was a member of the conspiracy and only had Dex, the half-living/half-ghost baby, because he was trying to make a body that he could use. They reach the cell and naturally it was a trick. The assassin abducts the dad and Dex has to fight an army of ghost mobsters. He tries to escape back to the living world but it doesn't work because something has happened to his body. He's saved by the timely intervention of the etherites, the creepy silent black figures that rule over the ghost world. They've brought his mother who explains that his father was a piece of poo poo but changed after they had Dex. Then the etherites power Dex up so he has a chance of stopping the conspiracy. Out on the conspiracy's oil rig, Dex's father opens the gate and it turns one of the conspiracy guys into a demon that starts killing people. Dex arrives and fights off the living and dead assassin along with the demon long enough that the gate could be closed again. With that done, the etherites take his dad away for an eternal reward with his mother. But they have another job for Dex. To be continued... or not. Sadly, not as good as the previous comics have been. Not as incoherent as Hyperkind, but it was definitely a "Let's wrap up all of the major plot threads quick" comic. Ectokid was a bit unstable but it always had the best talent of all of the Razorline attached to it and it was actually decent. Not something people have to read, but it was enjoyable which is more than I can say for the rest of the Razorline. Thus passes Clive Barker's comic book line. It come in with foil embossed covers and died as a result of being an obvious thing to cut. It's definitely a product of the boom era when Marvel was just trying to flood the shelves and push everybody else out. Conceptually, I don't think there was anything wrong with any of the books; there was nothing preventing Hokum and Hex from being a good comic except it was written like dogshit. I also don't think that better writing and art could have saved these comics since they died as the boom died. It's just that they could have been good. I kind of wonder if Marvel still owns the characters. Not that I think anyone is clamoring for the return of Ectokid; I just was wondering if he could be used again.
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Nov 1, 2021 03:29
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Barry Convex posted:long overdue, hope this effort is successful (thread) Good for them! I hope it spreads.
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Nov 1, 2021 17:21
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Nov 18, 2021 19:05
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Skwirl posted:Well this loving sucks. I've met him on multiple occasions at cons. He really is a cool guy.
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Dec 7, 2021 19:00
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X-O posted:Hey guys. I’m not going to be around much for a while. My mom passed away earlier tonight. She had a sudden sickness but didn’t suffer long for this specific instance. But she’d been fighting kidney disease for two years plus. She went peacefully with all our immediate family at her bedside. I could not ask for a better passing but I’m still kinda broken right now over the suddenness of it. I’ll be back later. Even when you're ready for it and made peace with it, it can still be rough. Stay well.
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Dec 19, 2021 19:16
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JordanKai posted:On one hand you hate to see the continued consolidation of media companies into an increasingly smaller group of giant conglomerates, on the other hand the Hellboy video game will probably be pretty cool. I've got a video playthrough of the first Hellboy game on my YouTube channel. It's one of the worst games I've ever played and I've played a lot of dogshit. There's also the second Hellboy game but I haven't tormented myself with that yet. So much of Dark Horse stuff is licensed or creator owned, I'm guessing that they were acquired as a facilitator. Or maybe someone really wanted to make Barb Wire 2.
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Dec 21, 2021 19:59
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