Saucer Country #6

Written by Paul Cornell
Art by Jimmy Broxton

Saucer Country is turning into a much more complicated and complex series than I first imagined, and where I was enjoying it before, now I'm also starting to respect it at a different level.

Paul Cornell uses this one-off issue as a way to reassess much of what has happened in the series so far, and place it in the larger context of the mythology and legend of UFO encounters and abductions.  Basically, this entire issue is given over to a presentation by the Harvard professor that Governor Alvarado has hired as her election team's inner circle's abduction expert.

In the first arc of this series, we learned that the Governor, who is running for president, and her ex-husband, had been abducted.  We also learned that a number of different interests have a stake in this situation, and that the entire country, if not the world, could be in danger.  The Governor decided that she would use her unique position, access, and political momentum to investigate and hopefully save the day.

So, in this issue, the Professor takes us from the earliest possible alien encounters - Romans meeting the gods, fairies taking humans to their lands, right up through Roswell, Communion, and Spielberg movies.  Through this issue, Cornell explores the social construction of aliens in the mind of the public, and how popular media has influenced it.  He shares the origin of the 'flying saucer' shape, and how it came to be perceived differently after the popularity of The X-Files showed something different.

I haven't spent much time reading about the history of this belief or sub-culture, so I don't know to what extent Cornell is making things up, or is relying on the historical narrative.  Everything he presents (through the character of the Professor) lines up neatly, and appears consistent.

This issue is drawn by Jimmy Broxton, best known for his brilliant work with Cornell on the under-rated Knight & Squire mini-series that DC put out prior to their relaunch.  Broxton uses a variety of styles and approaches to the various strange things he has to draw - I particularly liked the Roy Lichtenstein quality given to the page showing the first UFO sighting.  I love Ryan Kelly's work on this comic, but would not object to Broxton doing the occasional issue.

Even though we are only six issues into this series, this makes a very good jumping on point, especially for anyone with an interest in alien encounters who may not yet be reading this.

Dark Horse Presents #8

Written by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Evan Dorkin, Tony Puryear, Neal Adams, Howard Chaykin, Alan Gordon, Brian Wood, Martin Conaghan, Rich Johnston, and MJ Butler
Art by Duncan Fegredo, Jill Thompson, Tony Puryear, Neal Adams, Howard Chaykin, Thomas Yeates, Kristian Donaldson, Jimmy Broxton, Simon Rohrmüller, and Mark Wheatley

There are a lot of new things popping up in Dark Horse Presents lately, as some of the inaugural series in this anthology have conclude or gone on hiatus.  With these new stories come some big-name creators, and some people with whom I'm unfamiliar but am very curious to see more from.

This issue starts with a Kate Corrigan story.  Kate is a central character in Mike Mignola's BPRD, and in this story she reacts to the news of Hellboy's death, after meeting his companion Alice in a cemetery in England.  Some of the emotion in this story feels a little forced, and I found myself much more interested in what was happening between Kate and her German boyfriend Bruno than I was in the death of Hellboy.

There is an excellent Beasts of Burden story by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson, involving our usual cast of animals meeting a group of strange sheep one day.  Dorkin and Thompson have just about perfected their approach to these horror stories that feature talking animals.  Normally, I'd stay away from something like this, but these two have made these characters so loveable, and their stories so sad and loving, that I can't stay away.  This is one of the best comics being made these days.

I continue to be very interested in Tony Puryear's Concrete Park.  It's a near-future gangster science fiction story, and while he's still really just establishing characters and their relationships to one another, I find it pretty fascinating.  I've always been drawn to strong world-building in comics, and I'm appreciating the level of thought and planning on display in this series.

Howard Chaykin's Marked Man ends well.  I haven't always enjoyed this story of a hired thief and assassin who, after many years of successfully anonymous crime, is exposed, and his family killed.  He gets his revenge in this chapter, and Chaykin makes some interesting choices.

There is a very strange Tarzan story that starts in this issue.  It's set in a future world where most of our world lies in ruin.  Tarzan lives in a series of hidden apartments which are also greenhouses (I think), and gets approached by some people to do something.  Really, I think I need to read this again.  I did enjoy Thomas Yeates's art, which always looks so old school and so great.  This story reminded me a lot of Arvid Nelson's Zero Killer series of a few years back.

Brian Wood and Kristian Donaldson's new series The Massive debuts here, although what all it's going to be about is not yet clear.  We do get some very cool visuals of an independent military contractor being the only survivor after an oil rig that has been taken over by eco-terrorists gets buffeted by insanely strong waves.  It's Wood, so I know this is going to be great.

Martin Conaghan (who?) and Jimmy Broxton (who I loved on Knight & Squire, and who has reached some internet notoriety of late over his involvement in the failed Kickstarter sequel to Smoke) give us a very cool done-in-one story about time travel and cloning (two things which should never mix).

Rich Johnston, of Bleeding Cool fame, starts off a new series here, 'The Many Murders of Miss Cranborne.'  This is about a little old British lady who kills men of the cloth who she believes are not pure in their intent.  With Simon Rohrmüller's art, and the doughty speech patterns of the murderess, we are strongly in Agatha Christie meets Rick Geary territory, and I love it.

There are also new chapters of Skultar, which is kind of funny, and Neal Adams's Blood, which is still god-awful.  It's a shame there isn't a new chapter of Finder this month - that would have made this just about perfect.

The Unwritten #11

Written by Mike Carey
Art by Peter Gross and Jimmy Broxton

This issue finishes off the Josef Goebbels story, and has a lot of information revealed about Tom, and what he really is, not that Tom knows any of this yet.

In this story, he meets with the story of Jud Süss, the Jewish novel that was re-worked by Nazi propagandists to be an anti-Jew movie. The story has become a canker, a story so conflicted and at odds with itself that it is in great pain.

As the story of Unwritten progresses, it's becoming more and more interesting to see how Carey is playing around with the meaning of fiction in our lives.

The Unwritten #10

Written by Mike Carey
Art by Peter Gross and Jimmy Broxton

A new arc has started in The Unwritten, and Carey is taking Tommy and his crew into new directions. Having escaped the prison attack last issue by using his magic doorknob, Tommy has now ended up in a ghostly version of Stuttgart, during the second world war, a location marked on the map Tommy has been carrying around. This causes Lizzie to reveal a great deal more about Tommy and her creation than she would like, and Tommy meets Joseph Goebbels.

While the set-up is all quite interesting, what I like best about this book is the scene wherein Goebbels and Tommy discuss the differences between the book and film versions of Jud Süss, a novel about redemption through Judaism that was appropriated and altered as a piece of Nazi film propaganda. The biggest appeal of Tom Taylor's character so far has been, for me, his frequent use of literary trivia, and so I enjoyed this part of the story very much.