Fairest In All The Land

Written by Bill Willingham
Art by Chrissie Zullo, Karl Kerschl, Renae De Liz, Ray Dillon, Fiona Meng, Mark Buckingham, Phil Noto, Meghan Hetrick, Russ Braun, Tony Akins, Gene Ha, Tula Lotay, Marley Zarcone, Ming Doyle, Chris Sprouse, Karl Story, Nimit Malavia, Dean Ormston, Kurt Huggins, Adam Hughes, Al Davison, Shawn McManus, Inaki Miranda, and Kevin Maguire

I'd gotten pretty bored of Fables and its related properties, but with this hardcover, featuring work by a number of fantastic artists, but telling one complete story from beginning to end, my appreciation of Bill Willingham's work with these characters was restored.

Fairest: In All the Land is a terrific murder mystery that begins in the lost Business Office, and is narrated by the Magic Mirror.  Our narrator is also a participant in the story, as he realizes that a visitor has come into the office, a space that has been set dimensionally adrift, and has been cut off from the other Fables for a long time.  Shortly after this, beautiful Fables, starting with Rose Red, are being murdered.  A list of intended victims is found, and Cinderella is pressed into solving the murders.

Cindy's skills lean more towards espionage than detective work, and so it takes her a while to figure things out.  The Mirror has an idea of what's going on, but isn't able to communicate with anyone, trapped as he is.

This story ranges across the history of Fabletown, and involves a number of supporting characters showing up for a bit to play their part.  I'm not sure that someone new to Fables would get a lot out of this, but for a long-time, lapsed, reader, it was a treat.

Willingham was assisted by a remarkable list of artists.  I'm not sure what I found more exciting - to see up and comers like Tula Lotay, Ming Doyle, and Marley Zarcone represented, or to see actual interiors by Adam Hughes.  There are a few artists here who are unfamiliar to me, which is also pretty exciting, as the art is consistently great throughout this book.

Having finished this, the only Fables left for me to read is the last volume; I'm going to have to get around to that some time soon.

Dark Horse Presents #15

Written by Michael Avon Oeming, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Carla Speed McNeil, David Chelsea, Erika Alexander, Tony Puryear, John Layman, Bo Hampton, Robert Tinnell, Arvid Nelson, Nate Cosby, Mike Baron, and Kim W. Anderson
Art by Michael Avon Oeming, Phil Noto, Carla Speed McNeil, David Chelsea, Tony Puryear, Sam Kieth, Bo Hampton, Juan Ferreya, Evan Shaner, Steve Rude, and Kim W. Anderson

At this point, I'm pretty sure I would buy Dark Horse Presents every month just for Carla Speed McNeil's Finder.  Were the rest of the book full of stories by Howard Chaykin, Neal Adams (writing his own work), Jeph Loeb, Rob Liefeld, Mark Bagley, and Chuck Austen, I would probably still buy it, and only read McNeil's story.  That's how good Finder is.

In this newest chapter, Jaeger, stuck in the middle of the conflict over an Ascian burial ground, takes on his role as Sin-Eater, in an act that is equally horrifying and noble.  McNeil has often referred to her brilliant science fiction comic as 'aboriginal sci-fi', and that is clearly what is happening here.  It's very good, very powerful stuff.

This issue of DHP also brings back the series Rex Mundi, in a surprise story featuring Brother Moricant.  I'm not sure what all new readers would get from this comic, but it is nice to see Arvid Nelson and Juan Ferreya working together again, and I've always loved the masks that the brothers of the Inquisition wear.

John Layman and Sam Kieth's Aliens story snaps into focus this month, as we finally get a more solid understanding of the female main character.  Layman is not writing a traditional Aliens story at all here, and it's a bit of a shame that it's taken so long for that to become clear.  Were this a mini-series, that could be read in larger chunks, it would have probably worked better.

Michael Avon Oeming's Wild Rover, which gets the cover this month, also becomes clearer and more interesting, as a dark horror story.  Bo Hampton and Robert Tinnell's Riven jumps up a number of years this issue, and continues to build the groundwork for a successful horror tale.

I'm continuing to get a lot of enjoyment out of Tony Puryear's Concrete Park, which jumps all over the place, but is always an engaging read.

Kim W. Anderson gives us another story of twisted love, which works like an old school EC horror story, updated for the Internet age.  David Chelsea gives us an improvisational story with 'The Girl With the Keyhole Eyes', and the newest chapter of Ghost continues to be decent.

I'm glad that there's so much to enjoy in this series beyond the Finder chapter, which makes this a must-buy.

Dark Horse Presents #14

Written by John Layman, Carla Speed McNeil, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Dean Motter, Mark Verheiden, Bryan Oh, Tony Puryear, Mike Baron, Bo Hampton, Robert Tinnell, Chad Lambert, Michael Avon Oeming, Nate Cosby, George Schall, Rodrigo Alonso, and Kim W. Anderson
Art by Sam Kieth, Carla Speed McNeil, Phil Noto, Dean Motter, Mark Nelson, Tony Puryear, Steve Rude, Bo Hampton, Apri Kusbiantoro, Michael Avon Oeming, Evan Shaner, George Schall, and Kim W. Anderson

This month, Dark Horse Presents is 104 pages long.  Take in the fact that that is equivalent to more than five comics from Marvel or DC, which could run you between 14.95 and 19.95, yet this book only costs $7.99.  Clearly, the fine people at Dark Horse know how to give you value for your money.  Even if you don't love every story in here, you only need to love half of them or less to feel that you got your money's worth, right?

For me, as always, the Finder story is worth the price of admission.  This month's instalment is great.  Jaegar is still hanging out in Third World, the contested and unorganized region far outside the domed cities or tribal lands where he usually spends his time.  He comes across a cemetery in a field that is at the centre of a large, and loud, dispute between various factions.  It seems that a hotel corporation wants to build on the field, and were paying to relocate the bodies buried there.  That's all good, but a large number of previously unknown bodies have been found, and they are clearly Ascian.  Ascians, like Jaegar, are an indigenous people in McNeil's world, and the story can be read as a comment on problems that exist in North America today around sacred Aboriginal ground and the balancing act needed between tradition, cultural sensitivity, and the needs of commerce and current lifestyles.  But, this being Finder, it's not long before Jaegar finds himself stuck in the middle, and being perhaps, the only person who can resolve this issue, whether he wants to or not.  Great stuff, although I was hoping we'd see a little more of Professor Shar.

Also of note this month is the return of Tony Puryear's excellent Concrete Park strip.  It's been a little while, so I was a little lost as to what's going on, but I'm really enjoying Puryear's gangsta sci-fi.

Dean Motter's Mister X wrapped up in this issue.  This was a good enough story, but not among Motter's greatest.  Kelly Sue DeConnick and Phil Noto's Ghost works well, and John Layman and Sam Kieth's Aliens is much improved.

Nexus, by Mike Baron and Steve Rude, still doesn't appeal to me, but I did make it through this whole story about invasive alien bugs and a creepy space ship that has been in orbit around Ylam for fourteen years.

There are a number of new strips that debut this month.  Some are one-offs, and others are set to continue.  Some, I'm not sure if this is it or not.  Mark Verheiden (been a long time since I've seen his name), Bryan Oh, and Mark Nelson have a good story about humans fighting an alien invasion in Falling Skies.  It's a little familiar, but it's well told. 

Bo Hampton and Robert Tinnell begin Riven, a creepy monster story involving a strange little girl adopted out of a Romanian orphanage right after Ceaucescu's regime fell.  This story is full of suspense, and hinges on many successful little details.  I was pretty impressed by it, and look forward to seeing where it goes.

Radio Ga Ga is a memoir by Chad Lambert and drawn by Apri Kubiantoro (whose work reminds me of Francesco Francavilla, only rougher).  Lambert tells a story about his radio days, when a joke he made on the air was reported to the Secret Service as a threat to President Clinton's life.  Lambert writes this like a Harvey Pekar story, a fact driven home as he narrates it in a comic store, in front of an issue of American Splendor.  I love this story simply for the fact that it references WKRP...

Michael Avon Oeming's Wild Rover is a dark little tale about a man who is convinced that his vices are being caused by an evil entity in his stomach.  This is a very piercing story that shows a side of Oeming that I haven't seen in his work before.

Buddy Cops, by Nate Cosby and Evan Shaner, is a fun little strip about a Green Lantern-like galactic protector who has been demoted to serving on the NYPD, and his super-serious android partner.  It's cute.

A Spy Dream, by George Schall with writing assist by Rodrigo Alonso is a very cool little story about a female spy who dreams about settling down with her lover, who is on the other side, or is conversely about a bored housewife who dreams about being a spy.  It's beautifully drawn.

Finally (I'm not going to mention the short humour strips, as they don't appeal to me at all), there's Love Hurts, Kim W. Anderson's strip about a woman who meets the perfect guy in the park.  There's a sinister side to his knowledge of all her favourite things though.  It doesn't help that the guy looks just like Steve Buscemi.

In all, a very satisfying heap of comics for a good price.

Dark Horse Presents #13

Written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, John Arcudi, Carla Speed McNeil, Steve Niles, John Layman, Tim Seeley, Francesco Francavilla, Andrew Vachss, Mike Baron, and Dean Motter
Art by Phil Noto, Jonathan Case, Carla Speed McNeil, Christopher Mitten, Sam Kieth, Victor Drujiniu, Francesco Francavilla, Geof Darrow, Steve Rude, and Dean Motter

Sometimes I worry that this anthology is not always the best place for some of the comics that Dark Horse is presenting in it.  Lately, they've begun stories in DHP, and then spun them off into their own mini-series (such as Resident Alien) or on-goings (like The Massive).  In the latter's case, the stories were clearly serving an introductory role, and that was fine, but in the case of Resident Alien, the story was simply begun here, and then continued elsewhere, which makes it a tough story to follow for readers of this book, or for people who picked up the first issue, and would have had no clue what was going on (the DHP stories were printed again in a '0' issue).

I bring this up, because the 'concluding' chapter to Steve Niles and Christopher Mittens's Criminal Macabre story this month just stops; it doesn't really end.  At least the Occultist, which also concludes this month, more or less finished its story, while still setting things up to be returned to later down the road.

On the positive side, and worth the purchase of the book, is the new Finder story by Carla Speed McNeil.  She is continuing to examine the lives of Ascians in the region called Third World, as Jaeger and his new friend help an artist trying to sell her paintings.  At the contemporary museum, her work is too 'archaeological' and indigenous, but at the archaeology museum, her work is too contemporary, a trap which many indigenous and minority painters find themselves in.  There is a surprise return of an older character at the end of the story, which made me happy, but which would be utterly puzzling to a new reader.  I wish that McNeil was providing footnotes to these stories.

Also of interest this month is the continuation of Dean Motter's Mister X story, and John Arcudi and Jonathan Case's The Creep, which is excellent.  The Aliens story, by John Layman and Sam Kieth is a little better than its debut chapter, and Francesco Francavilla's Black Beetle is pretty, if also pretty standard.

The return of The Ghost, by Kelly Sue DeConnick didn't excite me too much, but it's an interesting story created by two very gifted comics creators; I'm going to see where it leads before I pass judgement. 

Andrew Vachss's prose story of child predators on the internet and the motley collection of freaks who hunt them down for profit was disturbing and weird, but not in a good way.  Nexus is boring.

Creator-Owned Heroes #1

Written by Steve Niles, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Justin Gray
Art by Kevin Mellon and Phil Noto

Before even discussing this book, I think we should take a moment to absorb the notion that this new series, so dedicated to creators' rights to own their own comics that they gave it the clunky name Creator-Owned Heroes, debuted on the same day as the first of DC's Before Watchmen comics.  Intentional?  Coincidentally awesome?  It's all good.

This is perhaps an example of the concept being better than the product, but I'm still relatively happy to plunk down $4 for something like this.  This is a thick issue, which opens with two 11-page comics, and is followed by some magazine-style backmatter.

The first series is American Muscle, by Niles and Mellon.  I'm not usually a big Steve Niles fan, but I have liked some of his books, and I enjoyed Mellon's recent work on Heart.  This series is about a group of friends crossing a post-Apocalyptic America in classic cars, aiming for the West Coast.  Niles explains that the catastrophe that finally more or less wiped out humanity was internal, involving the failure of our immune systems.  It's a bleak little tale that reads like an homage to B-movies about cars.  It's cool.

The second comic is by Palmiotti, Gray, and Noto, and involves some sort of assassin called a Trigger Girl.  We follow this one as she is awoken from some sort of pod, and sent on a mission that involves a US senator on an airplane, and two fighter jets.  It's good, but it doesn't do much more than set the tone for what is to follow.

The backmatter, which includes an interview with Neil Gaiman, is pretty much all forgettable.  Its clear that Palmiotti and company haven't fully decided where they're going with this title, and that's fine, but everything in the back half of this book felt very self-serving.  I like to support creator-owned work, but the concept is not all that new or groundbreaking, and probably shouldn't be discussed as such.

Anyway, this is a book worth supporting.  The two strips are not bad, and together they still make up more content than you would get from a $4 Marvel comic, even if you don't read the stuff at the back.

The Infinite Horizon #6

Written by Gerry Duggan
Art by Phil Noto

The Infinite Horizon has been a very cool mini-series.  Sure, it's easy to just complain about how many years it's taken for the series to be completed (for the record, less than Gutsville and Pirates of Coney Island), but now that it has finished, and presumably will soon be available in trade for people who waited, or perhaps hadn't even been comics readers when the series began, it's better to take a look at the work as a whole.

This series has been a loose adaptation of The Odyssey, set in a not-too distant future, where the world has suffered from environmental collapse, and the American government has fallen.  The nameless hero, and his squad of soldiers, have been stranded overseas by a government that can not afford to bring them home.  Their journey takes many years, and places them up against a number of challenges, such as a Russian supersoldier (standing in for the Cyclops), pirates, and a dangerous cult (representing Sirens).

Meanwhile, at home, the hero's wife and child have been trying to fend off people looking to take over the family farm in the Catskills, which has the only access to clean water in the surrounding area.

Now, with this final issue, our hero has finally made it home, and is looking to free his family and his land.  It's a brutal chapter, but necessarily so.  The ending is kind of obvious from the beginning, but that does not make it any less satisfying.

I don't know if Gerry Duggan has written any other comics (am I right in thinking that he works in television?), but I would happily buy something else with his name attached to it after this.  Phil Noto has always been an artist that I admire, and while this issue may feel a little rushed in places, he continues to impress.  Get the trade for this - you'll like it.

The Infinite Horizon #5

Written by Gerry Duggan
Art by Phil Noto

You know, when a comic hasn't been published since the spring of 2009, it's not a bad idea to include a recap page at the front.  I mean, Marvel does this even on comics that come out every second week (of which they publish way too many), yet with this book, which I didn't expect to ever see again, we are tossed back into the story with no real reminders as to what was going on.

The thing is, that didn't detract from my enjoyment of the comic in the least.  The Infinite Horizon is a reinterpretation of the Odyssey, yet set in the near future.  Our Odysseus remains unnamed, and he has been working his way home after finishing his time in some war on foreign soil.  Things have more or less broken down around the world - there doesn't seem to be any kind of reliable air transport, communication is almost non-existent, and the government of the United States has failed.  Our hero's contingent of soldiers has been whittled away through their journey, and when this issue begins, our hero is left with two women in a village not far from the sea.

He chooses to answer the call of some sirens, who are luring people to the shore with the promise of a journey on a large tanker being retrofitted into a modern ark.  The problem is that the people in charge are only looking for slaves.  When our hero meets up with his friend Fortunato, who I vaguely remember as having gone ahead while our man recovered from some injuries, they decide to take control of the tanker, and the oil rig that guards it.

This is a great comic.  I have enjoyed it from the start (however many years ago that was), and found that once again, it balances suspense and action with its classical origins very nicely.  Duggan (who I remain unfamiliar with) writes this book very well, but the star of the show is Phil Noto, who makes it look wonderful.

Apparently the next issue is scheduled to come out in November, and I believe that it's really going to happen.  There is no sense in recommending this comic to new readers now, but I do encourage people to pick up the trade.  Reading this gives me hope that I may soon be able to read more Pirates of Coney Island, Gutsville, and The Great Unknown.  Even one of them would be great.

Infinite Horizon #4

Written by Gerry Duggan
Art by Phil Noto
Like the journey of the unnamed protagonist in this series, and Odysseus, on who's story this title is modeled, the time and distance between issues of this amazing series are indeed very long. This comic was solicited for April of 2008, and is only now appearing.

It was completely worth the wait though. The injured Captain is taken to a hut somewhere in Africa to heal from the wounds that he endured last issue. As usual with this voyage, things don't work as they should, and the Captain ends up crippled both physically, with an improperly healed leg, and mentally, with both addiction and some form of PTSD. Meanwhile, his wife continues to seek the return of her son, and to do business at the end of a gun with people from a sunken New York City.

Duggan and Noto have done an incredible job of re-imagining the Odyssey. I will admit to a lack of familiarity with the portion of the tale that this issue is representing, but the way in which they have chosen to modernize this story is fascinating. Noto's art looks great, and the story reads well, even after a one-year hiatus.

I hope that I don't have to wait another year before I get to read more of this story.