HOLIDAY BLOGGING

Welcome to the first (of what I think will be two) holiday review blog. Today’s entry covers three items from our friends at Image Comics.

OUTLAW NATION is written by Jamie Delano and drawn by Goran Sudzuka and Goran Parlov. DC/Vertigo originally published OUTLAW NATION, but after sales figures came in for issue fifteen, it was given a death warrant and ended four issues later. This collection unites all nineteen issues under one cover, a mega-sized 450 page+ book. NATION follows the adventures of Story Johnson, a semi-immortal writer who returns from 25 years MIA in Vietnam to find his extended Johnson family in radical disarray. His father is controlling governmental agencies, his evil half-brother is a murderous freak, and he discovers that he has a son… and that son is about have to have a child of his own. Add a single mother and her mentally unstable son to the mix, and you get a sprawling Americana epic. The story is rich and complex- I really haven’t scratched the surface in explaining it- and the art, presented here in black and white, is terrific. The only place where the book suffers is in those final issues, where Delano had to artificially crank up an ending. But even then, he turns in a perfectly respectable effort. This is a keeper of a book.

Jae Lee writes and draws the collected HELSHOCK, co-published by Dynamic Forces. HELLSHOCK has been one of those “long, lost” projects, a book that achieved high praise and acclaim, but disappeared before it was ever completed. Now, Lee has put together his final chapter (and more) and brought the series together under one cover. The story concerns a young psychiatric intern named Christina who finds her own sense of reality and appropriateness eroding as she gets deeply involved with her patients. Unquestionably, the strength of the series was Lee’s beautiful artwork, and what makes this paperback even more interesting is that you can watch it develop over time. By the time you get to the now completed final chapter and see what he can do now… all you can do is say “Wow.” The series’ fatal flaw was that the story itself was never all that compelling, and Christina doesn’t garner much of your sympathy as a reader. The collected edition goes a bit further in highlighting the storytelling deficiencies, but the art makes the book more than worth buying.

ELEPHANTMEN #5 is written by Richard Starkings and drawn by Moritat. One of the problems with the earlier issues of this series was the anthological format; the creative team was delivering two stories that were generally unrelated and doing nothing but marking time in this world. But with issue five, the book takes a sharp turn into telling a larger, longer story, and the results make for a distinctly better comic. By returning to a couple of plot points introduced in the zero issue, we start to see the tapestry of a genuine plan behind Starkings’ stories, and it gives you a lot more confidence that ELEPHANTMEN isn’t existing solely as an artistic exercise. Of course, if it did, this would still be a fairly successful comic; Moritat keeps improving with each issue he turns out. But in the end, it’s better to produce something interesting and readable, and this could turn out to be something special in the long run.

/Mason