I WAS HOPING THE NEW SITE WOULD BE READY BY NOW…

Oh, well. Keep checking The NEW Comics Waiting Room this week, and cross your fingers.

CASANOVA #1
Written by Matt Fraction and Drawn by Gabriel Ba
Published by Image Comics

Casanova Quinn is the world’s greatest thief, a sex magnet, and luckier than anyone deserves to be. Sort of a reverse-image of James Bond, he eschews his family’s commitment to doing good in the world, leaving the secret agent stuff to his father and his twin sister. But when she’s killed in the line of duty, Casanova gets drawn into a strange scenario involving time travel, dimension shifting, giant floating brains, and more. I’d try and explain more of that, but wrapping my head around the twisty plot that Fraction put together gave me a headache. Fortunate, then, I was enormously entertained by the whole affair. CASANOVA is a blast of pop energy, not taking itself too seriously and delivering maximum bang for the buck. Plus, it looks brilliant; Ba’s pages are simply gorgeous to look at. At $1.99 this, like FELL, is something you simply cannot ignore.

DORK TOWER #33
Written and Drawn by John Kovalic
Published by Dork Storm



After a long layoff, due to some cool real world distractions for Kovalic, DORK TOWER returns, as strong as ever. This issue puts the focus on Ken, as Kovalic continues to spread the spotlight out amongst the cast. Ken’s problems are two-fold; one, he’s struggling to write good game modules for his friends, because he lacks an inherent passion and zest that pushes his stories to the next level. And that problem informs the second issue facing him: he’s oblivious to the needs of the girl in his life. Kovalic makes Ken’s troubles as a writer feel very real; anyone who’s ever sat at the keyboard and couldn’t figure out how to make their story jump from “okay” to “great” knows exactly how he feels. And you don’t have to be a writer to know how hard it is to read the signals from your significant other that she’s being neglected. Throw in well-executed movement on Matt and Igor’s plots, too, and this is a strong return for a terrific book.

SKYSCRAPERS OF THE MIDWEST #3
Written and Drawn by Josh Cotter
Published by AdHouse Books


I had the good fortune to read the first two SKYSCRAPERS back when they were published as mini-comics a couple of years ago (AdHouse reprinted them at standard floppy size). They had won the Isotope Award for minis, and deservedly so; Cotter was clearly an insane genius, melding the absurd with deep emotional pathos with alacrity. Issue three is more of the same. The main storyline involves a withdrawn fifth-grader whose name we never get, but we know him well. He’s shy, loves his toy robot and dinosaur, and is terrified of declaring his feelings for the girl he admires from afar. He also gets pushed around a lot. Even if we weren’t that kid, we knew him. But alongside that plot, we also follow the path of a giant robot wandering the plains and dealing with a bizarre pack of flying cats, and a lonely farmer who likes to wander the roadside picking up cans with his faithful dog. Someway, somehow, Cotter manages to make these plots work together and feel perfectly normal and logical. It’s quite a feat. Beautifully drawn, and cleverly put together around a design resembling a fifth grade yearbook, this is an excellent book.

ELEISON #1
Written by Elena Carillo and Drawn by Jaime Carillo
Published by Here There Be Monsters Press


ELEISON isn’t a standard comic. Instead, it’s an illustrated prose story. Set in 1833, we discover a young woman teacher with a strange sickness: a bloodthirst, a hunger, that causes her to attack a student as though she were a vampire. That sends a young priest named Peck out into the wild in the hopes of returning with a legendary clergyman named Jean-Marthe Baptiste who it is believed can solve the problem. Baptiste, known to the local Native American population as Waabooz (“Rabbit”) supposedly has experience with the supernatural. But with such a strange malady, it is unclear whether or not his experience will be enough. The illustrations by Jaime are really quite lovely, though they don’t really do much to push the tale along. They are very much a solid, literal translation of what we get from the text. The story itself is fine; I never felt as grounded in the environment as I’d have liked, but that is something that can be rectified as the book progresses. Solid, if unspectacular, debut.

AUTOPSYROTICA
Written and Illustrated by Chad Michael Ward
Published by NBM


This is about as dark and disturbing of a book as I’ve seen in a while. I’m fine with that, though.

AUTOPSYROTICA is a collection of illustrated photographs, accompanied by short text pieces that present a crisply inferred story. By illustrated photographs, I mean that Ward has used a model (usually a goth or fetish model), set up a scenario and captured it on film, and then gone to work with digital paints and other media in order to complete the picture. It’s a remarkable and deeply involving set of artistic creations. This book is about the conjunction of sex and death, and the illustrations here meld the two as though there is no separation between them at all. It would be easy to say that, looking at Ward’s work, there is nothing attractive about what he puts on the page here, but you have to look deeper than that. Yes, there’s a horror in many of his pieces, but in many of the others, there’s something beautiful simmering just below the surface. This is a challenging work, but an admirable one in the attempt. I wouldn’t recommend it to any but the most advanced and open-minded readers though.

RED SONJA #10-11
Written by Mike Oeming and Drawn by Mel Rubi, Pablo Marcos, and Lee Moder
Published by Dynamite Entertainment


Issue ten concludes the storyline wherein Sonja acquires a protégée much like herself, and it is quite satisfactorily executed. Oeming sends Sonja on the girl on their mission, and it feels genuinely like the title character has come fully alive on the page. She’s clever, caring, and really seems like she has her shit together. Of course, that can’t last, so issue eleven goes a long way towards putting her life in the toilet. I’m fine with that, as it’s a dramatic necessity, but the execution was off through the issue. As she faces a foe far stronger and smarter than her, there’s a sense that Sonja regresses needlessly; with this enemy, even at her fullest strength, it would take more for her to win. There’s also an added tragedy thrown into the mix, which again, didn’t feel completely necessary for the plot to achieve its aims. SONJA continues to be a solid book, but I’m reserving judgment as we see where the next issue, revealing the series’ main villain to date, takes the character.

ARMY OF DARKNESS #7-8
Written by Kames Kuhoric and Drawn by Kevin Sharpe
Published by Dynamite Entertainment


ARMY #7 concludes the “Old School” plotline, which sent Ash back out to that cabin in the woods where he lost the love of his life and his hand those many years ago. This has been the most fun the series has delivered to date; nothing feels more like a Bruce Campbell moment than kicking a severed head and shooting it with a shotgun while it’s still in the air. Funny stuff. But Kuhoric also manages to make the ending a bit sad, as Ash discovers that he can never even consider giving up the fight for a long, long time. Issue eight begins a new story, “Ash vs. Dracula”, and it gets off to kind of a disappointing and slow start. Kuhoric decides to start us at the end of the tale and tell it in flashbacks, which is a fine device… when your opening place is a whopper. But Ash’s situation at the start of this issue is kind of pedestrian. Sadly, Sharpe’s pencils, which get colored directly, also look a little loose in issue eight as well. Disappointing, but there’s room to recover.

PAINKILLER JANE #2
Written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Drawn by Lee Moder
Published by Dynamite Entertainment



On the other hand, this book delivers exactly what you bought it for: ridiculous, over-the-top action, story logic be damned. In issue one, the basically indestructible Jane took out a bad guy who was being guarded by dirty cops. Now, the cops want her dead, and only her insiders on the force feeding her information keep her a step ahead of the bullets. However, the bad guy from issue one had family, and they’ve taken the women he was keeping as slaves into their own home for nefarious purposes. So Jane’s job isn’t done, and more people are going to have to die. Daring escapes, rooftop gun battles, long falls from high windows… they’re all here. Palmiotti is smart enough to know that no one picks up this book expecting to find a sensitively told tale of a woman struggling with her inability to die. This is pure fun, and I dug it.

/Mason