The Napalm Reviews

Back in the day, Howard Chaykin made a splash with a little indie book called BLACK KISS.  It changed a lot of the comics landscape and helped bring the medium into a more adult world.  This year, he came back with a sequel, and it’s filled with cover to cover strangeness, mostly monster porn and genital mutilation.  The first issue really kicked things off pretty well, and some of the shit that went down in its pages was some mind-blowing, crazy stuff.

The problem is, starting with issue two, it petered off, and with #6, the final issue, he goes out with a whimper, not a, um, well, a bang.

BLACK KISS 2 follows a succubus over the course of about a hundred years as she fucks and kills just about everyone she meets.  Along the way, she makes her own companions by taking cross-dressing guys and turning them into actual women, and she usually renames them to Dagmar and makes them look like her.

Now that we’re up to 2010, we’ve come to the purpose of this story.  Our heroine has come to the conclusion that she doesn’t really need companionship after all these years.  Uh … what?  Is that really the entire point of this story?  We went through all of this porn—and Chaykin, who is the artist in addition to being the writer, pulled no punches by illustrating penetration, oral sex, all sorts of things—and genital mutilation after genital mutilation just to get to this wishy-washy message?

Well, that’s part of the problem, actually.  Chaykin uses a pretty decent idea for a story but ignores it for the most part, using it to decorate his tale of supernatural sexual depravity.  It should be the other way around; story should be the foundation, and the crazy porn should be the decoration.  Because of this, the plot seems murky and almost non-existent.

But there is something to be said for his attention to the baser stuff.  He gets some amazing visuals, a lot of it beautiful, and a lot of it cringe-worthy.  Even women are made uncomfortable by watching a dick get bitten off; every male reader will spend most of their time with their legs crossed.

If only Chaykin paid more attention to the story.  This could have been a revolutionary book.  Instead, it will probably be dismissed as sexual garbage.  Incidentally, it’s not.  He had the good instinct to have a great jumping-off point, but he just couldn’t follow through.  That’s too bad.  This could have been more than a titillating read.

 BLACK KISS 2 #6

Written and illustrated by Howard Chaykin

Published by Image

20 pages

$2.99

HOLY SHIT!  GARTH ENNIS WROTE A NICK FURY AND FRANK CASTLE TEAM-UP FOR MAX!  If that sentence alone doesn’t get you to buy this book, than nothing will.

For eight issues, Ennis has been describing Fury’s Cold War years in a story called “My War Gone By,” and it is exactly as awesome as you think it is.  This isn’t a classic Marvel war book, after all; Ennis gets down to the ugliness of war.  He shows Fury in all kinds of unpopular situations, including his participation in the Bay of Pigs Invasion.  Fury commits a lot of nasty deeds in the name of his country.

All of this is dictated into a tape recorded by Fury as he sits in a darkened hotel room, glugging down whiskey to ease the memory of all the awful shit he’s gotten up to.  Last issue saw him team-up with the Punisher, presumably before Frank Castle became the Punisher, to hunt down a Vietnamese commander.  This issue finds the both of them captured as Giap tries to get them to turn against the U.S.  Of course, things do not go very well, and our heroes get their asses kicked.

Unfortunately, things aren’t going to get any better for them.  Since Giap is so elusive, and no American has ever seen him alive (except for Fury, and now Castle), the government spooks have decided that it’s just going to be better for their interests if they send in a bunch of planes and bomb the area Giap’s supposedly in back to the Stone Age, even if it means killing Fury and Castle.

Talk about some shady shit.  Ennis, a long-time student of war, knows all the terrible things that have gone on over the years, but where he really shines is the depiction of the conversation between Giap and Fury.  Giap tells Fury that they wouldn’t have been captured if they’d killed a peasant boy that had discovered them in the jungle.  Fury says that he’s got a thing against killing children.  Giap shoots him down with this:  “Oh?  Your B-52’s drop several tons of ordnance on my country almost every day.  Men, women, children, all atomized together in their hundreds.”  Yikes.

Ennis couldn’t have done it so well without the help from his old PUNISHER artist Goran Parlov.  He gets down and dirty; you can see all the grime of war in his work.  You can feel Frank Castle’s rage baking off the page, and you can practically feel the scratchy texture of Nick Fury’s beard.

So, in case you didn’t get the message, GARTH ENNIS WROTE A NICK FURY AND FRANK CASTLE TEAM-UP FOR MAX!  Don’t miss it!

 FURY #8

Written by Garth Ennis

Illustrated by Goran Parlov

Published by Marvel Max

22 pages

$3.99

Ed Brubaker has long been making a name for himself with his modern noir style, and more recently, he’s been doing an excellent job of borrowing from horror and fantasy pulp writers with his book, FATALE.  Now that it’s time to start a new story arc, it’s time to bring in a different pulp taste.

So far, he’s had a hint and dash of Cthulhu, which he does more of in issue 11, but by setting his new tale in Cross Plains, TX, with a pulp writer who is very concerned with his mother, Brubaker adds more than a hint of the creator of Conan the Barbarian (among others), Robert E. Howard.

Over the past 10 issues, we’ve gotten to meet and know Josephine, a very dangerous, very sexy woman who seems to be immortal.  This time around, while she is very much the same kind of person, we get treated to an earlier version of herself, one that doesn’t know quite what she is.  She still manages to seduce a young police officer into doing terrible things, including murder (naturally) and the betrayal of everything he stands for, but at this time in her life, she had no idea as to why she’s capable of this.  She knows that men constantly fight over her, and they’re drawn to destroying whomever she’s dating at the time, but she doesn’t know where this magical ability comes from.

Enter Alfred Ravenscroft, a pulp writer who, while he’s not an exact replica of Howard, will definitely serve for Brubaker’s purposes.  When he was a young boy, his mother dragged him into a relationship with a seeming necromancer, and they go on a spiritual trip to Mexico to discover a way to convene with the gods, who very obviously seem to be Great Old Ones in the Lovecraftian tradition.  Things go wrong, and Ravenscroft comes back home an absolute mess.  His mother also comes home, but “she left big pieces of herself in Mexico.”  Ravenscroft eventually writes about his experiences for a pulp magazine, and it is this issue that Josephine finds.  It draws her to find Ravenscroft and find out where this story came from, because it is an exact telling of the dreams she’s been having of late.

As if the world of FATALE wasn’t rich enough, Brubaker piles it on and draws you deeper into this horror noir that he’s concocted.  It lives up to the traditions, but he throws in enough to update the genre in ways one wouldn’t expect.  Not only that, but the revelation of what happened to Ravenscroft’s mother would have been enough to get Robert E. Howard himself to, uh, well, blow his own brains out.  With this little stand-alone tale, Brubaker has definitely upped the ante.  From his afterward, it seems that this idea is the one that started him down the path to writing this very series.

And he has chosen his illustrator very well.  Sean Phillips, his longtime collaborator, is the only one who could have done this project justice.  His history with HELLBLAZER definitely prepared him for a book of this caliber, and his work on CRIMINAL readied him for his prowess with Brubaker’s particular brand of noir.  If you don’t believe it, just wait until Ravenscroft’s mother is revealed.  And then, just wait until the final, glorious panel.

Don’t let this book get lost in the shuffle.  Aside from CRIMINAL, it’s the best work Brubaker has done in his career.

 FATALE #11

Written by Ed Brubaker

Illustrated by Sean Phillips

Published by Image

24 pages

$3.50

Make no mistake about it, Nick Sax is a bastard.  He’s a violent ex-cop who hires himself out as a hitman, but all his nasty deeds have come home to roost as the mob who used to hire him are now out to kill him.  To make matters worse, he’s injured pretty badly, so he’s in a miserable state of mind at the moment.

But hey!  It’s Christmas time!  Who the fuck isn’t happy at Christmas time?

Writer Grant Morrison, who is batshit crazy by any standard, throws his own personal twist into Nick’s unfortunate circumstances:  he’s being plagued by a little girl’s invisible friend, a tiny blue unicorn with rabbit-ears and buckteeth by the name of Happy.  You see, there have been some kidnappings lately, and the little blue fella’s human, Hailey, is among the missing.  If she dies, and it’s very clear that she’s going to be raped and murdered for a kiddie porn ring, then the imaginary friend will die.  He desperately needs Nick’s help to save Hailey because of all the people in the world, Nick is the only one who sees Happy.

This is a concept only someone like Morrison can come up with.  Brilliant, violent, funny, and full of heart.  In this issue, we learn how Nick went from a good cop to the piece of shit we met in the first book.  It’s a very depressing story, and while it seems that he is, to some degree, responsible for what happened, it also lets a little bit of humanity creep into his angry, self-loathing attitude.

But no matter how hard Happy tries (not to be confused with the mobster, whose name is Blue, and that certainly can’t be a coincidence), Nick simply refuses to help him save Hailey … until he learns that Hailey is actually his daughter.  Even though it was a very predictable twist, Morrison knows just the right moment to use it and turn up the heat.

Best of all, the illustration is done by Darick Robertson, one of the best artists working in the business right now.  If this was what he was working on that distracted him from THE BOYS, it was worth it.  The artwork couldn’t be more perfect, it is that good.

The crowning moment of this book:  when Happy tries hard to convince Nick that he should be excited about Christmas, and Nick convinces Happy to take a look at all the miserable fucking bastards that are on the train with them … and sure enough, all of them are angry and argumentative despite the season.  Because seriously, who the fuck is happy at Christmas time?

HAPPY! #3

Written by Grant Morrison

Illustrated by Darick Robertson

Published by Image

24 pages

$2.99

When one thinks of comic book heroes, very few people think about Avatar Press.  That’s all right, considering how Dan is not an ordinary hero.  In fact, he barely qualifies as human, even though he does good deeds.

He’s a very unusual guy.  He’s a private detective who really doesn’t like doing work.  His perfect day would consist of banging hot chicks and then relaxing in the middle of nowhere, dozing and listening to the Melvins.  Even when someone who claims to be his daughter comes along and begs him for help, he barely registers her.  In fact, he completely denies fathering her, but he gets kinda-sorta guilted into helping out by his homeless friend, Tober.  Even though Tober has been dead since issue one, Dan addresses his inner monologue to him and blames him for all of these troubles.

You see, the thing about Dan is, he really is unharmable.  Nothing can kill him, nothing can hurt him.  Part of being like that, though, has dehumanized him a lot.  He doesn’t care about anything, and he doesn’t feel any obligation to anyone.  In fact, he cares so little about everything that he has very little memory.  He tells all of his adventures to a recorder so he can remember them later.  The only time he’s ever been angry is when a thug accidentally cracked his Melvins CD.

All Dan wants is to be left alone, but circumstances keep dragging him into ultraviolent situations.  The best example of this can be found in this issue, when he’s beating the shit out of a guy who just attacked him.  After this fellow has been slapped around pretty badly, he says he’ll tell Dan whatever he wants to know.  Dan says, “Do I look like I want to know stuff?  Tell whomever and why-ever you work for, that I don’t care.  I’ve forgotten all about you ten seconds from now.”  And that’s as he’s pulling this guy’s tongue out.

And now, even though one daughter is in trouble for wanting to “cut [a male classmate] a vagina” and the other might be pregnant by a cult leader who might also be her real father, Dan would much rather fuck his troubles away after enjoying some ice cream.  How is that for a hero?  Only writer David Lapham could come up with a guy like this, and only Rafael Ortiz could bring him to life.  Ortiz portrays Dan’s world so wonderfully you can practically hear Jeff Bridges’s The Dude when Dan talks.

Expect great things from this book in the issues to come.

DAN THE UNHARMABLE #8

Written by David Lapham

Illustrated by Rafael Ortiz

Published by Avatar

22 pages

$3.99

Dynamite has been making a name for itself as a publishing house for classic pulp titles, but it also has a strong stable of newer material, like Vampirella and Dark Shadows.  (All right, that’s a far cry from new, as the former debuted in the ‘Seventies and the latter arrived in the ‘Sixties, but still, newer than the Shadow, for example, or the Spider or Green Hornet.)  They’re essentially IDW, but with a more classic taste.

Unfortunately, this also means they’re venturing into the realm of the crossover, and that never works out, artistically.  (It didn’t work out that way for IDW, either.  Remember INFESTATION?)  This sick, unhealthy tendency has given us the Vampirella and Dark Shadows crossover, and it’s a fucking disaster.

Well, if you’re a fan of Vampirella, you’re probably okay.  This crossover treats her pretty well, since there really isn’t much to her books.  They cater to readers who have a thing for gore and barely concealed boobies, and there isn’t much wrong with that, but it is creatively empty.

But if you love Dark Shadows, prepare yourself for a savage betrayal of epic proportions.  Writer Marc Andreyko definitely has a couple of characters named Barnabas and Quentin Collins, and they certainly look like their TV counterparts (thanks to artist Jose Malaga), but they have very little in common with the source material.

The very first mistake Andreyko makes is to take Barnabas and Quentin out of Collinsport.  There isn’t a single, solitary time on the original show where a scene took place away from this town.  They mentioned characters traveling to Bangor or to Boston, but they never depicted such sojourns.  Why?  Because due to the nature of the story—remember, this is a GOTHIC, not just any horror story—it doesn’t work anywhere else.  It’s about the cursed Collins family and their ancestral manse.  If you take the setting away, the story falls apart.  [EDIT:  There were a few scenes early on in Julia Hoffman’s appearances which took place at her asylum in a neighboring town, but that is the ONLY example.]

Yet here we have Barnabas and Quentin, accompanied by Vampirella, traveling to fucking England to do battle with Elizabeth Bathory, a vampire who is committing all sorts of atrocities.  (Never mind that Elizabeth-Bathory-as-a-vampire is an overdone bit.  There are worse offenses to be found here.)

And here’s another thing:  NO ONE ON DARK SHADOWS EVER DID BATTLE WITH ANYONE ELSE.  There were fights, sure, but this was the epitome of polite horror.  There was never any gore (maybe a spot of blood here or there), and there certainly weren’t any epic superhero-type battles.  On page two of this issue, Vampirella and Barnabas come crashing through a window, roaring, ready to kick all form of ass.  Uh … no.  That is as far from Dark Shadows as you can get.  Also, there is a very graphic scene where a guy gets his hand bitten off.  That would have never happened on the show, and not because they didn’t have the budget to do it justice; it’s just not right for the sensibilities of the show.  Not to mention the fact that after Quentin transforms back from being a werewolf, he’s stark naked.  The idea of showing so much as a little leg on the show is unthinkable.

No, this is not your father’s Dark Shadows.  In fact, it’s not Dark Shadows at all.  Barnabas has more in common with Buffy’s Angel here, and Quentin is more of a Spike figure.  The only reason Dark Shadows is a part of this book is so Dynamite can get an extra four bucks out of their fans each month.  Fuck ‘em.

Andreyko has clearly never watched the show.  This is very evident in a scene where Barnabas rips out a person’s throat with his teeth.  He would never do that to his bitterest enemy, yet here he is, doing just that.  Malaga does the best he can with the shit he’s been given.  It looks like a very nice book, but his talent is being wasted here.

Avoid this series at all costs.

DARK SHADOWS/VAMPIRELLA #5

Written by Marc Andreyko

Illustrated by Jose Malaga

Published by Dynamite

20 pages

$3.99

IDW has a great thing going with their take on the Transformers these days, and now that they’ve added a third book to their repertoire, can they manage to keep the magic going?  Well, they took a step in the right direction by focusing this one on the Dinobots, who are all fan favorites, but what about the quality?

Sad to say, it’s only just good enough.  There isn’t a lot to say about TRANSFORMERS PRIME:  RAGE OF THE DINOBOTS.  When it comes to a book about Grimlock and friends, people tend not to think much about things that don’t involve kicking ass.  The Dinobots are, essentially, the warrior class of the Autobots, after all.  However, considering everything IDW has done with a bunch of robots that turn into cars, planes, and other stuff, you’d think they’d delve a bit deeper into what it takes to be a Dinobot.  At the very least, they could get a little Sun Tzu in there, right?

Nope.  Here’s what happens:  in the time before the two new TF books started, the Autobots are facing off against the oh-so-cleverly named Ser-Ket and his Decepticon-ish soldiers.  The Autobots are abandoning Iacon, and the Dinobots are covering their escape.  Unfortunately, Ultra Magnus’s ship gets shot down, and Grimlock swears to find it and rescue his leader before it’s too late.

And that’s it.  It’s paint-by-numbers bullshit.  Sure, it’s good enough to satisfy, but not good enough to live up to the greatness of MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE and ROBOTS IN DISGUISE.  Writers Mike Johnson and Mairghread Scott have a good grasp on the Dinobots, but they don’t seem interested in doing anything new with them.  For example, Grimlock, Slag, Sludge, Snarl, and Swoop are the lowest, brutish, most primitive characters in the Transformers universe, and by all rights, they should be Decepticons.  Why not explore their reasoning for being good guys?

Here’s something that Johnson and Scott kinda-sorta do right:  Grimlock’s speech doesn’t sound too bad, not like it was in the old Marvel comics and on the ‘Eighties cartoon.  There is a bit of lazy crap in there, but for the most part, he doesn’t sound like a moron.

And hey!  At least artist Agustin Padilla makes everything look pretty.  It looks like it should be a book about Dinobots.  There is a lot of action, but very little else.  Unless you’re a huge Dinobots fan, don’t bother.

TRANSFORMERS PRIME:  RAGE OF THE DINOBOTS #1

Written by Mike Johnson and Mairghread Scott

Illustrated by Agustin Padilla

Published by IDW

22 pages

$3.99

Judge Dredd is, hands down, the most popular character in British comics, which is kind of weird, considering how he’s the protagonist of a story that’s really a satire about America.  At the same time, despite several attempts to bring Dredd to the U.S., audiences here just don’t seem willing to take to him.  Mention his name to someone around here, and they’re likely to mention the absolutely shitty Sylvester Stallone movie.

Considering how moviegoers reacted to the Karl Urban DREDD, it’s not likely that Britain’s number one guy will be popular here any time soon.  This has not stopped IDW from trying their luck with brand new Dredd material.

The difficult task of finding people to care about Dredd in Americahas fallen upon the shoulders of writer Duane Swierczynski.  Can he find just the right mixture of ultraviolence and dark humor to appeal not just to original Dredd fans, but also bring new ones into the fold?

His first outing isn’t bad.  There is a full, rich world that the American readers don’t know about, and there is just no way he can bring them up to speed.  A summary would probably take up a mini-series on its own.  He does his best to paint a picture of Mega-City One and to give a fairly good description of what Judges do before plunging into the story at hand.  A criminal group has been stealing body parts for some unknown purpose, and they’ve sabotaged a synthetic fruit tree to cover their escape from the Judges.  (Yeah, this is a very, very strange way to put it, but there is simply no other way to put it.)  When they incapacitate a Judge, Dredd takes these guys very seriously and prepares to administer his brand of justice … only, thanks to the mess produced by the tree, he has to pursuit on foot.  Not only that, but things aren’t what they seem at first, and there is something else behind the crimes.

It’s not the best Dredd story idea ever, but it’s not bad.  It’s a little hard to get into at first, even for those familiar with Mega-City One, but once the action starts rolling, the reader is swept in easily.  And Swierczynski does a pretty good job with the character.  When your protagonist is both the hero and the villain of the story, you have to walk a fine line, and he seems to pull it off pretty well.  It helps that artist Nelson Daniel is more than capable, and he seems pretty familiar with Dredd.

Lo! and behold!  Just like with the original 2000 AD books, this one has a back-up story!  Written by Swierczynski and illustrated by Paul Gulacy, it focuses more on the humorous side of Dredd.  A shopkeeper tries to get his security droid to defend his store against looters, but he’s sexually abused her so often that she refuses to do the job, and in fact tricks him into murdering a thief.  Enter Dredd, and hilarity ensues.  While it is a pretty funny story, it is weaker than the first, and Gulacy’s style doesn’t quite fit in with Dredd’s.  After all, he has Dredd smiling at one point.  Dredd does not smile.

The world of Mega-City One is too big for American audiences at this time.  There is about thirty years of continuity, and it all moves in real time.  There’s no way for IDW to fit in all of the details, like how Dredd is a clone of the original Judge, or that he has a clone brother named Rico (who went bad and had to be dealt with).  They do have the time to tell you his first name, though:  Joseph.  This may or may not hurt the series.  Only time will tell.  For now, they’re off to a good start.  Not great, but then again, when it comes toAmerica, Dredd has always had the deck stacked against him.

JUDGE DREDD #1

Written by Duane Swierczynski

Illustrated by Nelson Daniel and Paul Gulacy

Published by IDW

22 pages

$3.99

Ask any fan of H.P. Lovecraft to name his favorite of the Old Gentleman’s stories, and AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS is probably not at the top of their list.  Chances are, though, they remember it more than his other work.  It’s hard to forget a tale about a scientific expedition toAntarctica, at the time the least explored part of the world, that finds an ancient city hidden away in the icy mountains and the ancient monsters that built it.

However, it has become the “in” thing to adapt Lovecraft to comic book form.  One can’t even walk into their local shop on Wednesday and not be confronted with such a project.  The good news:  writer I.N.J. Culbard understands the story at a gut level, and he delivers like a motherfucker.  The bad news:  Culbard, who also illustrates this book, matches up such an awesome story with substandard artwork.

Not that he’s bad.  When he works on landscapes and inanimate objects, he is a master, superb in every stroke.  When it comes to people, on the other hand, he drops the ball.  They look too cartoonish and unbelievable.  Granted, he tried to make them look like they really belonged in the ‘Thirties, but he just can’t get past this unfortunate style.  In one of the grimmer scenes, when the scientists come upon a camp where the inhabitants have been slaughtered and pieced together in interesting ways (one man’s face has been cleaved in two, and the creatures thought to replace that side with some of a dog’s head), things that should come off as horrifying and stomach turning seem more laughable.  And every time they hear the infamous “Tekeli-li!” it comes off as stupid because of the cartoonish, Batman-POW-BAM way it’s depicted.  And don’t even bother with the giant, blind penguin.  One more:  the shoggoths look like something Bugs Bunny might have hiding under his bed.

But the buildings are pretty awesome.  When one reads the book, one has a definite, Giger-ish idea of how they’re supposed to look, yet in Culbard’s book, they look like skyscrapers.  Very unexpected, but somehow it works.

Culbard also gives us a look at the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, possibly the first time he’s ever been depicted in comic books.  We also get treated to a scene telling us how he died, which to the best of memory is never included in a Lovecraft story.

It is also kind of weird how the protagonist knows the secrets of how the Old Ones created life on earth.  Has he read the Necronomicon?  It’s never explained, but that seems to be the only explanation.  Well, he is a professor at theMiskatonicUniversity, and they have a copy of that dread tome.

So … is this book worth your time?  It’s hard to say.  The artwork is pretty off-putting, but the writing is spot on.  If you can get past the cartoonishness, and it is very hard to do that, you won’t be disappointed.

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS

Written and illustrated by I.N.J. Culbard

Published bySterling

124 pages

$14.95

Can writer Mark Millar be any more awesome?  Once again, he knocks it out of the park, this time with a new mini-series epic, SUPER CROOKS.  Unshockingly, it is worth noting that this is yet another book he has sold to be made into a movie BEFORE EVERY ISSUE HAS BEEN RELEASED.  That’s an astonishing feat.  He has a lot to live up to.

Millar has no problem with that.  This time, he goes in kind of a Garth Ennis/THE BOYS direction.  Witness the Gladiator, one of the biggest superheroes in this world.  He talks like any average joe, cursing and calling people assholes.  He also has no problem dishing out ultra-violence for a good cause:  putting bad guys behind bars (but putting them in traction first, of course).  Witness the Praetorian, a very unconventional superhero who offers a beautiful supervillain a deal:  he’ll let her go if she blows him.

Millar also borrows a bit from Ed Brubaker’s INCOGNITO in regards to supervillains.  It’s hard not to see the protagonist of this story, Johnny Bolt, as portrayed by Sean Phillips.  On the day of his wedding, he pulls a jewelry heist and gets the shit beat out of him by the Gladiator.  He then goes to jail when he should be going on a honeymoon.  When he gets out, he comes to an interesting conclusion as to why the superheroes always win.  As a result, after he reconciles with his fiancée, a fellow supervillain named Kasey, he decides to move to Spain to pull heists.  Why?  Because there are no superheroes there.  “Think about it,” he says, “their money’s as good as anyone else’s and I’ve never heard of a Captain Spain, have you?”

Millar offers a lot more to go with this.  In a world where super powers exist, of course the psychics would go to a casino.  However, the industry is ready for such tactics; they have their own metahumans working for them.  In one hideous scene, a cheater is dragged into the back room at the casino, where such a metahuman teleports a cigar box into the cheater’s head, killing him instantly.

It also helps that Millar has a great eye for artists.  Leinil Yu is perfect for this book.  There is a definite Phillips influence here, which also makes a great INCOGNITO connection.  Yet this is not noir, like Brubaker’s work.  No, this is more like the Clooney remake of OCEAN’S ELEVEN with supervillains playing the crooks.  (Hence, you know, the title.)

How can you not be entertained?  Come on.  You already know you’re going to buy this book.  You’ve done so with all the great things Millar’s done lately, like WANTED and KICK-ASS and SUPERIOR and NEMESIS and all the rest.  There is no doubt about it:  he’s doing some great stuff with his Millarworld books (even if he’s a bit presumptuous; it takes a lot of gall to proclaim your company the third in the industry after the Big Two).  Don’t put it off until the trade comes out.  Besides, that could take a while, considering how Millar’s books aren’t exactly always on schedule.  Get in on this book NOW.

SUPER CROOKS #1

Written by Mark Millar

Illustrated by Leinil Yu

Published by Millarworld

24 pages

$2.99