The Factual Opinion

SPX 2016: The Hits

These are some of the comics I brought home from SPX. This post will be updated for the next few weeks or so.

Yellow Zine #7
By Roman Muradov

While I’ve never spoken to anyone about Roman’s Yellow Zine series besides Roman himself (and even then, it was only with what could probably be best described as a dismissive grimace, as if the Zines had been made by someone Roman knew but didn’t particularly care for), I’d wager that any conversation around them would be a delight for those who participated and totally interminable for anyone listening—which, in truth, would most certainly please the author to no end, even if he refused to admit it. 

Similarly to Roman’s Nobrow book (which I worked on in a mercantile capacity, and that’s about as far as I’ll go with taking the notion of objectivity seriously), the Yellow Zines are rife with allusions and referential humor, of which I’m only able to grasp a modest few—Roman is an Olympian level reader,  the sort of person who should have been born 100 years ago, when fishmongers masturbated to the Decameron—but they’re also bawdy, mean things…and you don’t need to know anything about literature to catch meanness. (This isn’t the truth of all of the Yellow Zines, it isn’t even true of the totality of this particular installment, but the sharpest bits of this one are, in fact, the sharpest bits—the moments that leave a mark, the lines that betray the desire to cause a wound. Towards the end, there’s a very funny bit where an artist overly praises a cute dog who represents his audience. We see the dog mindlessly binge read, eventually die, only to be criticized for being dumb and tasteless in the first place. Is that what Roman thinks of his audience? Because if it is, in this reader's case, he's not far off. Here's a blurb for you: unrivaled delight.

Revenger & The Fog #3
By Chuck Forsman

While the first Revenger story arc (hey!) was more 80’s VHS, The Fog is the one that’s more 70’s—specifically, the vans of Texas Chainsaw and the villains of LA crime noir. As with most action thriller narratives, this, the penultimate chapter, is the most exciting one. It’s the one where our villains seem most unstoppable and disgusting, the one that sees our heroes at their lowest. Chuck’s style with the Revenger series is at its most refined here, which is to say that it’s not “refined” in the traditional sense at all. Gangly, uncoordinated figures operate in distinctly blank space, fighting and moving (and hating) within lined drawings that are, many times, at odds with how one might expect characters to move. It’s a gnarly kind of work, and it’s hard to imagine this story working any other way. (If you put it against Chuck’s more traditionally drawn work in The End of the Fucking World or Celebrated Summer, the pieces make sense: these ropy muscles and brokeback knees are needed for the narrative to maintain its momentum forward—why else does Forsman resort to his more widely embraced traditional alt style when its time for the molestation flashback?)

It would be interesting to see the color go full neon, now that I’m thinking about it. Family meeting!

Lou
By Melissa Mendes

This Alternative Comics collection of Mendes’ Oily series by the same name is as much a talent showcase for Melissa as her previous book Freddy Stories was. A straight forward depiction of a low income family with specific focus given to one particularly eventful evening, Lou is more winning in this larger format than it was in installments. Melissa’s writing is what so often gets brought in for praise, and rightly so—there’s no false notes in these comics, and her awareness of what does and doesn’t need to be made explicit in a narrative is exceptional and rare. But reading it again, I found myself more taken with how important her drawings were to the story overall, and how much emotion was continued in these simple illustrations. A little boy’s terrified attempt to hold hands, a young man’s confusion at the sight of his bloodied boss, and most of all, Lou—a young girl, at times sullen, at times excited, at times furious. It’s all depicted with simple, direct, confident lines, hinging on the locations and size of the eyes and little else. More so than comics, Melissa’s most direct comparison should be picture books—it’s not hard to see her transitioning into drawing something like Steig’s Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, or Dr. Desoto, albeit with human leads. Whatever she does next, it’ll be worth the time.

 

Woof: A Field Guide To Dog Anxieties
By Tom McHenry

A series of one page, eight panel comics introducing the world’s dogs. From the workout obsessed Swole Dog to the self-pitying, race-losing Squeal Dog—actually, this isn't a very useful description. Woof isn’t a lateral range of characters, with one extreme to the other, each one tied specifically to a one word description. (Although there are a few that work like that, most impressively the one named “Sprawl Dog”, which is eight panels of an overweight dog in socks and loser gear trying to find the perfect position for the couch nap that's staving off his next installment in binge eating.) What Tom has done here is build individual worlds that share a galaxy, or lay out the houses in a neighborhood—a place where conversations about the importance of performative atheism and social media opinion posturing are commonplace, the school in the Harry Potter books is a real place (that dogs can choose to go to), and there’s a reference to Manhunter, one of the finest movies ever made.

It’s a fine line doing smartass humor, one that not a lot of people can manage—the jokes become too difficult to understand, too off-putting. McHenry’s trick here is that while he can go incredibly specific with what you need to understand, but without ever coming across as smug or self-pitying. It’s not an easy thing that he’s doing. The world of comics is rife with work that commits crimes of alienation far outpacing whatever actual slights spurred their initial creators forward in the first place; unfortunately, these types of comics are so easily available because there’s a rapacious audience who eats them up, moral superiority and all. Woof doesn’t just avoid falling into that trap, it never really even comes close to skirting the line—it’s just page after page of eight panel heart attacks. It’s hard not to read this alongside along Sara McHenry’s Listless and imagine their household being one where you’re living through the kind of workshop that produced that old Army Man ‘zine. Strong shit here.

Missiles of Montgomery County
By Alexis Frederick-Frost

Extremely stripped down cartooning, a non-fiction subject brought forth with the kind of concision and lucidity you wish came with every single story like it you’ll ever hear, this is, at its most Platonic, the comic book version of a great, never-forgotten piece of trivia you hear at a barbecue from a stranger. After you’ve both run through the “what do you do for a living” stories and the discussion hits upon that weird abandoned field five minutes down the road, you'll hope for a guy dryly saying “I actually looked into it, and it turns out..” and in less than ten minutes you find out the history of anti-aircraft missiles in suburban Washington DC. There’s not a huge amount of bravura flourish that goes on in a comic like this, but if there was, it could possibly detract from its utilitarian function as information delivery. I’m not sure what this style of comics is called—there are more and more of these semi-educational comics every show—but this is certainly on the stronger end.

Listless
By Sara McHenry

A series of lists collected into a zine by comedy writer Sara McHenry. One list is called “Your Dad’s Favorite Books” and includes things like Woodworking The Honest Way, Tom Clancy’s Political Science Minor and a Never-Opened Copy Of Your Graphic Novel. Another list is called Cool One-Liners I Could Say While Killing A Bad Guy, And The Weapon I’d Have To Use For The Joke To Work.

I liked this a whole fucking lot, is the subtext here.

Dad’s Weekend
By Pete Toms

Pete Toms makes dialog heavy comics based very much in the real world, which is another way of saying that it includes a lot of internet and social media awareness. It’s a tactic that a lot of writers (and generally speaking, all cartoonists) ignore, which results in stories that, bad or good, tend to have a vacation-y, aspirational quality. Look at all these characters who aren’t spending their lives tacking an extra five minutes onto a dump hate-reading social media updates! What a protagonist I might be if I could have a conversation that didn’t involve recapping the last 24 hours of headlines I half understood! In Toms’ work, there’s no such respite—people talk the way we talk, and due to his decision to have so many panels framing the characters dead on, they’re talking to you. Initially, it can be off-putting—as in real life, being barked at isn’t that pleasant, and it’s a hell of a lot worse when the barking involves memes you don’t really understand. It’s worth burrowing into Toms work though, as accepting his delivery methods opens up into a world that can be very funny.

Dad’s Weekend is what it sounds like: a young woman spending the weekend with her father, a man who is handling all of the trials of middle-age about as poorly as one can. Embracing whatever version of reality it is that lives to the crazier side of truther-doctrine, he’d be a giant embarrassment to his suffering daughter if she was capable of caring, but she isn’t, and her general apathy as he spends 48 hours making his life even worse makes the comic a solid excursion in look-at-this-fuck-up porn that you never feel guilty for enjoying, even when he produces a maudlin bit of mush mouth rationalization for why he does the things he does and believes the things he believes. 

Burt’s Way Home
By John Martz

This is a graphic novel broken up into two narratives, each of which tells the story from the other character’s point of view. Those two characters are a little boy named Burt who has lost his parents in an undescribed tragedy and the woman who has taken him in on what, based off some of the later word choices, seems to be a permanent basis. As would be expected with that set-up, the story is a demanding one. Martz is no stranger to the challenge, most of his work—even the comics that are more out and out comedies—tend to have a brittle crispness to them that fits well with his delicate linework. (If comic art was a food, Martz’ would be those hard boiled eggs that old people place in a  silver holder, to be broken with a spoon.) Burt’s Way Home ups the ante, seemingly styled for younger readers who may have difficulty grasping the lack of specificity at its core, but that’s a sales concern, not an artistic one—and it is impossible to argue that the book fails to achieve a special grace. It’s lovely work.

Blammo #9
By Noah Van Sciver

While these tiny little blurbs aren't official "reviews" or anything serious, I still feel a little guilty churning out some kind of dipshit personal essay style missive...and yet, I feel like it would be disingenous to ignore the emotional reaction I had upon turning to this page in Blammo 9. It comes towards the end of what one hopes (for the sake of CCS) is an exaggeration of Noah's time spent at that school in Vermont. The emotion I had one was one of astonishment at how far Noah has come in the last 8 years that I've been reading his work followed immediately by the painful reminder that I won't be standing in a comics shop tomorrow morning answering the occasional "what are you reading" question by grabbing an issue of this off the wall. A dense, inexpensive comic that demands an investment of time and attention that it is rewarded ten times over--this is one of the best things he's done, and that's the feeling I've had every time I've read something by him in the last two years. Disquiet, Fante Bukwoski, Blammo 8.5, My Hot Date--they're all great. They're inspiring work, read in the knowledge that he got good the only way I can understand, by just obsessively making and making and making. I've never denied my affection for discipline and machismo, and to see what that kind of attitude can produce....I wish I could disengage from it enough to talk about it more analytically. To argue for its value as an artistic achievement. Not because I think that is what it needs, or because it would help the work sell--nothing like that. But because it would be the small token; it would be the petty coin that one could offer to show that the hard work that has been given has been returned with a hard work in kind.

Cankor: Calamity of Challenge #1
By Matthew Allison

Matthew has been making Cankor drawings and comics for years, I first came across them at Bergen Street Comics, where the aggressively drawn muscular striations and dripping skin, giant figures in landscapes that looks like overly realistic depictions of Herriman landscapes served as a perfect respite from the walls of comics with similarly violent themes. Taking on its own, this issue--which feels like Allison's best drawn comic yet, even if I'm wrong and it's just been a while, it's great, great stuff--is an astonishing comic, opening with a monstrous yet vaguely autobio section that reads like its written by Gilbert Hernandez making fun of Michael Deforge which gives way to a glorious, atonal sequence on some kind of moon, where characters rip open the landscape to reveal distended corpses and send others splintering into oblivion, then a manipulated author photo calling back to the autobio section, a one page guest pin-up that has more work put into it than most artists put into six issues (it's by Buster Moody, he deserves a raise at whatever it is else that he does), and then--and this really comes out of nowhere--a perfect one page homage to John Porcellino in the form of King Cankor Comics. Let me abundantly clear, by repeating myself: this comic book is fucking astonishing.

Our Concerns
By Roman Muradov & Sophia Foster-Dimino

A short back-and-forth between Muradov and Foster-Domino that employs the former's love of language and the latter's geometric line effectively, resulting in a funny slice of the two cartoonist's shared affection for one another. Eight pages, it's probably all online somewhere, but there's something to be said for having it in cupped hands. 

Diary Comics #5
By Dustin Harbin

I was only at TCAF for a few hours this past year and missed this installment of Dustin's Diary Comics series. While it's possible to keep up with Dustin's work on his website (and I imagine many do), i've been out of step with comics since the closing of Bergen Street Comics, making everything here (except for the heartbreaking "Dream" from last December) totally new to me. This collection is the most painful one Dustin has done, and considering the reputation that autobiographical work has for being lonely-worship solipsism, it's strangely courageous to see Dustin--one of the few people in comics that is funny in the sense that he makes you laugh, as opposed to being called funny because he makes you feel like you're safe--commit to the relative mundane topic of habitual exercise, middle-aged ennui and everything else that comes with break-up recovery. Ultimately, the collection works because of its unsentimental commitment to said mundanity, essentially setting the stage with "Dream" and then continuing onward at a specific, intensified pace while Harbin puts in the hours (both at his day to day existence and in front of his sketchpad) making his way out of pain. I think the main reason that people tend to respond so negatively towards the idea of autobio comics about feelings is that they (rightly) think that many of them are performative rehearsals of negative feelings, center-of-attention showcases for self-obsessed children. Dustin's work, as far back as I can remember, has never been guilty of that. Diary Comics 5 may have the most graceful of openings, and the ending may be a closure-free bit of downcast whimsy--but that's to its credit. It's a lovely piece of work.

Space Rope: Mars & Venus
By Casey Bohn

A personally prophetic horror mini-comic from 2011 republished with two additional stories by Oily Comics, Space Rope follows the titular rope from space through three stories. While the violence throughout the comic is offset quite a bit by the retro-esque style dialog and cartooning, there's an extremity to the whole thing that underlines the personal significance that the stories have for Casey, some of which are made explicit in the mini's afterword. A strangely touching mini-comic still firmly in touch with its horror roots.

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Darwyn.

I found out that Darwyn Cooke knew my name back in 2008, when he showed up on this blog and left a comment supporting my decision to burn a giant X-Men omnibus. It remains (and will remain) my favorite way I have ever met a comics creator. I had no idea how he found the blog, or whether he was joking or not about burning books--at the time, I remember being convinced it was some odd kind of joke. I had an email conversation a few days later, but even after I knew it was true, it still had that same feeling: that this couldn't be happening, and I wasn't allowed to be happy about it, because it was a lie, and the rug was gonna get pulled.

But it was true. And while we didn't speak very much, Darwyn and I did email each other a few times. We spoke mostly about a John Flynn movie called Rolling Thunder that I had fallen for pretty hard, and that eventually led to him asking me to interview him for a big article on his second Parker adaptation, The Outfit. 

It was a lot of work, and I've never done anything quite like it since. I sat in my apartment in Brooklyn, talking to him on the phone for hours. He was funny, charming, and very smart: but most of all, he had a definite set of feelings and opinions about his work and the work of others, and it was exciting to hear that, to hear someone who wasn't concerned with pretending to like everything. I transcribed the conversation into an 15,000 word piece, found a home for it with Laura Hudson, who figured out a way to split it into seperate parts so that whoever it was that owned Comics Alliance at that time would have to give me more money, and we put it out there. I then got a chance to meet Darwyn when he came to New York for a book signing, and he took me out to dinner with Marsha and all his friends. He treated me like I was Gay Talese and he was Sinatra, and while the evening's performative qualities took a wear on both of us as the night went on, it was one of the few times in comics where the show we were all playing at felt like one put on by wry grown-ups as opposed to the dress-up games that stunted children so frequently play now. I lost my temper on one of Darwyn's dipshit synchophants, Darwyn needled him alongside me to defuse the tension, I went home embarrassed. We spoke a few more times, and that was it. I was proud of that piece of writing, and I think Darwyn was happy with how it turned out as well. We had another follow-up planned--the conversation we had on the phone that day went into many more subjects besides Parker--his feelings about Chris Ware, his thoughts on Batwoman, people he didn't like (people that I didn't like), but it never came to pass. I never did the work, and that night had burned me out. I didn't want to be Gay Talese, and I wasn't a good enough writer anyway. Instead I kept the raw mp3 recordings and promised myself we'd do it later.

We didn't speak much, but when there was a minor fracas over some comments I made about why the piece went to Comics Alliance instead of its original home, he stood up for me immediately. We caught up briefly, and that was it. Years passed. We decided not to carry the Watchmen books at Bergen, and word got back to Darwyn and Marsha, and I was too lost in my own head to realize how that might make them feel, something I didn't even pick up on until a few years ago, when we saw each other again at TCAF. I'm ashamed that I never reached out to him before I sat down on some useless MoCCA panel to say we were going to do that to a pack of assholes who didn't care about comics in the first place. In that moment, Darwyn deserved to be treated with more respect than I gave him. He deserved a heads up, even if I disagreed with him, because he had disagreed with me multiple times before that and had addressed it with me immediately. I apologized a bunch at, and after, that TCAF show. But a late apology really isn't worth that much. It isn't worth anything at all.

I am not part of his circle of friends, i'm not a close associate. But I will say that I saw him with those people, and I know that he loved them dearly, and they loved him right back. He was a funny smartass, and I think those are the best kinds of people in the world, and I think there are not enough of them. I wish I had done a better job of being the kind of person to him that he was to me. I will never forget the time I got to spend with him, and how much fun it all was. 

Thanks Darwyn. God bless you too.

 

Triple Trouble

After the jump, you'll find the new episode of the Travis Bickle on the Riviera movie podcast!

It Was Important That She Lived Those Next 24 Hours As A Black Woman

 

What The Hell Is This: Why, it's Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane, issue number 106.

Why We Have A Copy Of This: Tom Spurgeon occasionally posts links to people who sell comics, usually because said people are in need of the kind of emergency funding only 70's comics can provide. This came from one of those times, and the idea behind the purchase was that TFO's own Nina Stone (who was actually Nina Miller during the hatching of the aforementioned idea) would read the comic and respond to it in some kind of pithy, I'm-a-woman observational fashion. (This was during the second major wave of female-front-and-center-super-hero-comics-blogging, a six week period that began approximately right after Valerie D'Orozio's fourth public retirement wherein one could earn thousands in Internet Dollars merely by adding the word "patriarchy" or "refrigerator" as keywords in banal recaps of Joe Kelly comics.) Having never gotten around to doing anything with it, July of 2011 seems like the time to shit or get off the pot. (And February 2013 seemed like the time to finish that...I don't like this metaphor.)

Hence: Ignoring for a second that this is a comic where Lois Lane submits to a Laurence Fishburne style Deep Cover for the purposes of ratting out the black experience in the Metropolis of 1970, the thing that most grabs me about this comic today is that issue number: 106. According to that Comic Book DB site, the series got started back in 1958, and it didn't finish up until 1974. While I'm sure that, like most Superman/Lois Lane stories, that means there were a lot of comics that feature Lois doing boneheaded shit that neccissitated a Super-save (saves that all but guarantee a healthy amount of shit-giving), I can't think of one non super-powered female character who has seen such a lenghty run of comics.

That Being Said: If all those 137 issues of Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane were as boneheadedly off-base as this turkey, it doesn't really mean a thing that they existed at all. This fucker ain't helping nobody.

How So: Tasked with writing "the inside story of Metropolis Little Africa", an admittedly Pulitzer-hungry Lois checks her make-up and heads over to the "black community". And there, she finds nothing but rudeness! Black children walk away from her and her questions with a silent contempt that Werner Roth and Vince Colleta depict as fear, adults slam doors in her face...one woman even wheels her baby away from Lois "as if [she] were the plague!" See, look.

After being rejected by the black community in the form of white fiction's most sterotypically accepting black member (that would be a kindly old blind woman, who silently walks away from Lois the second she hears that braying white voice), Lois finds herself on the receiving end of some serious hate speech: she's "whitey", the biological wall of hate that keeps the black community entrenched in "rat-infested slums", the capitalist fatcat who employs them only in service positions. She's the enemy, and she'll never understand. That is, unless Superman happens to have a plastimold and transformoflux pack.

Dude, he totally has both of those things.

At this point, the comic becomes a sort of no-self-awareness parody of that Eddie Murphy sketch where he painted his face white and found out that the black people were missing out on all kinds of free shit. Lois immediately heads home to change into "beautiful afro attire", gets ignored by her white cabdriver friend (she refers to this as her "first lesson in the meaning of black", hops onto the subway (where all of the white people stare at her as if she is a "freak"), and then she walks into the first apartment building she can find. Which is on fire, of course, because the landlord decided not to have anyone take out the garbage anymore. Helping put out the fire, Lois finds herself invited into the same apartment by the same woman who, a scant few white pages ago, had slammed the door in her face. There, she finds out that black women are constantly on guard for invading rats, fending them off of the succulent eyes of their infant children with brooms and rage.

After a tearful goodbye, Lois finds herself in a meet-cute with the now-introduced Dave Stevens, the man who was previously seen wearing skin tight green jeans and calling Lois "whitey". Joining him in a poorly thought out attempt to reprimand a couple of drug dealers, Lois is there to catch him when he gets shot in the chest. That's "catch" in the literal sense, too. Take a look at what Lois is doing in this classic Superman-melts-some-guns-panel:

You ever tried to hold the dead weight of a full grown man in your arms like that? Lois Lane is fucking strong.

Now, if you were to guess that Lois Lane ends up in the hsopital, donating blood to a bullet ridden Dave Stevens, and that this led to a scene where Dave realized that white people and black people can help each other, because they're both just plain old people down at the circulatory level, well: you'd be a cynical S.O.B., but you'd pretty much be right. It's a silent scene of shock, realization, and then good old hands-across-America stuff that closes this issue, and considering the way anything racial usually gets handled in comic books...well, this method is pretty much not that horrifying, even though you probably assumed it was going to be.

And The Moral Of This Story: is that there isn't a neat and tidy one, and if there was, it most likely is going to show up some place other than a Lois Lane comic book with a title based around my least favorite installment in the Criterion Collection. And yes, I'm aware of the film Armageddon.

-Tucker Stone, 2013

Comics Of The Weak: At Least Whitney Missed Peter Panzerfaust

Thief of Thieves #1
Art by Shawn Martinbrough & Felix Serrano
Written by Robert Kirkman, Nick Spencer & Shawn Martinbrough
Published by Image Comics

From the back page essay, written by one of this comic's writers: "[Thief of Thieves] brings to the comics medium the same kind of story you'd get in a movie, novel or a TV show, but we're utilizing the strengths of what our medium has to offer in order to tell the story."

That statement is referring to a comic book constructed almost completely out of widescreen panels, most of which utilize the same basic film tricks that even the most low-grade television show has. Consistently featured are tricks like repeating an image of a blank expression so that the character being depicted can be seen pausing before delivering a punchline, or using stark, capitalized sentences atop the image to illustrate that the story has jumped to a different time or place. The story is--no kidding around here--about a weathered and wearied criminal who wants out of the crime racket while he still has his teeth intact. His possible thwarting may occur at the hands of his spunky hip chick protege, who has tattoos to go with her piercings, or it may occur at the hands of a balding, overweight crimelord/father figure who wants him out there pulling another big job. How much do you want to bet there's a black guy with glasses who is really good with computers coming around the corner? You should be able to spot him easily, as he'll be accompanied by a fat guy from the Middle East who handles weaponry and/or lives in a strip club.

Then again, maybe this comic really is "utilizing the strengths of what our medium has to offer". It just turns out that Robert Kirkman believes one of the medium's biggest "strengths" is that most comics readers are unsure of how to turn on a fucking television set. That's always possible.

Batman #6
Art by Greg Capullo, Jonathan Glapion & FCO
Written by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo
Published by DC Comics

This is the conclusion of the first story arc for the series, and it turned out to be the hipster douchebag version of that old Batman mini-series by Jim Starlin, The Cult. The Cult was DC's first post-Miller attempt to do a Serious, For Mature Adults story featuring Batman. In the end, that just meant watching Batman get himself physically and emotionally debased for multiple issues before rising up and returning the favor in full--which is exactly what this new story was as well. Here, the main violence done to Batman is at the hands of a character named Talon, a character who looks so much like Marvel's Nighthawk that it'll get your dog pregnant. Mostly, it's just a violent fight comic, which is the sort of thing that DC publishes a lot of. The difference this time around is that the Batman fight comic doesn't look like shit, and that somebody--a somebody with some actual sense, which is kind of a surprise--got the word count down to a manageable, less leave-me-the-fuck-alone number.

B.P.R.D. Hell On Earth: The Long Death #1
Art by James Harren & Dave Stewart
Written by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi & James Harren
Published by Dark Horse Comics

Featuring the best last seven pages of any comic you're likely to find, The Long Death would probably get called "A Return To Form" if the previous story, Russia, hadn't turned out to be as good as it was. On the strength of this one issue, The Long Death does seem like it's going to be even better than Russia was, as this looks to be the first BPRD story since that John Severin War On Frogs issue to be going for the Holy Fucking SHIT audience so hard that it sort of makes my teeth hurt, which is totally a good thing. If this were a poker game, I'd go all in: this one is just that fucking good.

Lobster Johnson: The Burning Hand #2
Art by Tonci Zonjic & Dave Stewart
Written by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi & Tonci Zonjic
Published by Dark Horse Comics

The big comment this time around on Lobster Johnson is going to be the one about Tonci Zonjic, and it's totally obvious why: the guy is extremely talented. The way he sets up and delivers the final panel in this issue--where the old Chekhov adage is followed, and a first act fedora is finally removed--quite nearly bends the comic in upon itself, forcing one's attention to rest on a single image so well known to BPRD readers that its mere appearance behaves like a kidney punch to the memory. There's more going on than one panel, but basically, this is everything one could want, assuming that what one wants is good shit.

Peter Panzerfaust #1
Art by some guy with a David Tennant fetish
Written by some other guy with a David Tennant fetish
Published by Image Comics

This is--jesus fucking christ, get ready--a Peter Pan story set in World War 2 era France, or at least, set in a gray color field littered with brown and green squares that people keep calling World War 2 era France. The main character (his name is Pete Panzerfaust) rescues some orphans...some lost boys...and then he helps them jump really far...almost like they're flying....all while generally behaving with the same cloying, inhuman perkiness that you always find in comic books trying to seperate themselves from the nasty antihero books that everybody else puts out. Or maybe the guy just won't grow up. Like the song from the movie. But hey, maybe you're into this sort of nonsense. Some people are! Those people should probably be put on a watch list. A suicide watch list. Because liking this will make you want to kill yourself. Clap if you believe in fairies!

Winter Soldier #2
Art by Butch Guice & Bettie Breitweiser
Written by Ed Brubaker & Jackson Guice
Published by Marvel Comics

There's so many wonderfully tiny images in this comic--a smudged bit of darkness to stand in for a shadow, a sihoulette of a gun being covered in snow, a scribble that stands in for a hand, degrading fragments when an image gets blown up too many times...it's all very much in a Steranko vein, but it's so much less enamoured by the world in which its contained. It would be over the top to claim it for something other than Marvel, and it's only a matter of time before their insane release schedule cripples this title the same way that upcoming Punisher crossover is going to kneecap Daredevil, but that's just the way these kinds of comics are going to be from now on, apparently. All minutes, no hours.

Daredevil #9
Art by Paulo Rivera, Joe Rivera & Javier Rodriguez
Written by Mark Waid & Paulo Rivera
Published by Marvel Comics

Nice issue and all, but really, this fucking foodie thing...like, there's a reason most of the people who buy Daredevil and read Marvel Comics don't pay attention to conventions, twitter feeds, this blog or the thousands of others like it, and that reason is all wrapped up and personified in this letters column, which features a picture of the writer of the comic being carted off by the corporate cargo shorts guy to said guy's current most-preferred trough. Like, do we really need to do this? Why not just shit on a child's face at his mother's funeral for a couple of hours, post a video of that? Either method is as repugnant. Seriously, clap if you believe in fairies.

Red Hood and the Outlaws #6
Art by Kenneth Rocafort & Blond
Written by Scott Lobdell, Josh Williamson & Kenneth Rocafort
Published by DC Comics

This is a flashback issue that fills in the gap where "how these two people know each other" was, with the two people being Jason Todd (the Red Hood) and Starfire (the hardbody orange girl who wears the metal bikini). The backstory is, no fooling, a naked shipwreck that results in the two best things that a young man can experience, which is A) playing with superguns and B) getting crazy laid, thus proving once again that Red Hood and the Outlaws is the number one DC book if the contest were Not Being Completely Full of Shit About What the DC Audience Likes To Read.

Secret Avengers #22
Art by Gabriel Hardman & Bettie Breitweiser
Written by Rick Remender & Gabriel Hardman
Published by Marvel Comics

One of the many weird things that goes with reading super-hero comics is the acceptance that, while all super-heroes can be categorically organized as being essentially indistinguishable beyond their differences in costumes, there will always be a few specific ones that you just fucking despise to such a disproportionate degree that it will make you feel a little bit insane every time you remember said hatred. Example? Captain Britain and his second rate Captain America outfit. Is there any super-hero character as pathetic as this guy? Even that joke version of Captain America from the JLI, General Glory, was more inspiring than Captain Britain, and General Glory spent half of his existence as an old man with his speckled ass hanging out of a hospital gown. It's not that this particular hatred comes from the realization that Captain Britain represents some dunderheaded criticism of the UK as a place so devoid of ingenuity and innovation that the best hero they could hope for and create is a half-ass imitation of Captain America--in fact, that explanation is one that only exists after the fact. The guy is just eye cancer, which is the opposite of eye candy.

Plastic Man Archives Volume 5
By Jack Cole
Published by DC Comics

The fourth volume of these Plastic Man reprints flagged a bit, with the moment where the character takes on the form of an amorous whale (submarine sized, mind you) the only Gold Medal of Weirdness on display. But whatever it was that had killed Cole's enthusiasm seems to have been removed from his diet by 1946, as the stories from this period are right back up there with the cartoonist's previous high points. This time around, Plas goes after the likes of a man who can send anyone (except Woozy) into a deep coma merely by mentioning that a nap might be a good idea, a gun-wielding psychotic who likes to masquerade as a bespectacled infant and a couple of goons who go pretty far into Jack Bauer territory on a small child, all so they can get a magic lamp working. Although it's a waste of time to pretend that the audience for this volume aren't going to read Volume 4 no matter what let's go ahead and do so: this one makes that one look like the proverbial piece, and if there's only minutes left to choose? You know what to do.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Thread of Tears
Art by Goseki Kojima
Written by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima
Published by First Comics

This is another installment of Lone Wolf and Cub where the Wolf deals with the fallout from an earlier battle--specifically, he has to face off against the widow of a samurai he'd killed a ways back. She's been laying in wait for him since that day, weaving and crying (hence the title of the story), and as there's never even an implication that she'll serve as a dangerous opponent, Koike and Kojima utilize the battle as a chance to drive one of the saga's pet moments home once more. That moment comes up when little Daigoro falls through the ice into a nearby pond (at this point in the story, a bitterly cold winter has set in), only for the Wolf to ignore his drowning son's cries completely. Stoic even in the face of possible tragedy, he explains the true way of vengeance to the woman as he has numerous times in the story so far. His explanation is then echoed in Daigoro's own actions, as the little boy refuses the offer of rescue the widow almost immediately provides. As she has shown herself to be his father's villain, any help she offers is to be rejected, even if one's own death is the result. It isn't the first time in the series that Daigoro's burgeoning metal has been put on display, but that doesn't make it any less potent. Another excellent installment.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

Comics Of The Weak: Pardon Our Brevity, We're Still Recovering From That Thing With Madonna Singing All Our Childhood Favorites

Blazing Combat #3
Art by Joe Orlando, Reed Crandall, Eugene Colan, Alex Toth, Wallace Wood, Gray Morrow, John Severin
Written by Archie Goodwin, Alex Toth, Wallace Wood
Published by Warren

This is excellent, of course. These issues (as well as others) were collected by Fantagraphics a few years ago, but there's something to be said for cracking open the yellowing pages behind Frank Frazetta's somber illustration of an American soldier standing knee deep in a pile of dead Vietnamese soldiers, the faint sky blue smoke rising from his rifle. Anti-war war comics are tough work--you're basically saying that you're planning to be entertaining, but this is the kind of entertainment that should leave you stroking your chin and looking off into the middle distance--and it would be impossible for all of those attempts to stick the landing. But if you take a second look at the line-up of talent this one bears, it's no surprise that so much of it does work. Severin's story is a nasty piece of EC style "surprise, asshole!", delightfully stocked with the same kinds of expression heavy faces you'd find in a Maguire Justice League. Toth's is pure post-apocalyptic lechery, with a climax that will appear doubly insane to modern readers. For my money though, the best thing in this package is Reed Crandall's "Foragers". A classic slice of that war comics staple--fragging the lunatic in charge--blessed with the sort of caricature style art that nowadays only shows up in movie parodies, if it shows up at all, and its reliance on brevity only ups the savagery with which it delivers that most classic of messages: Don't Be a Fucking Asshole.

Animal Man #6
Art by John Paul Leon, Travel Foreman, Jeff Huet, Lovern Kindzierski
Written by Jeff Lemire
Published by DC Comics

This issue of Animal Man is taken up with a comic length presentation of a super-serious film version of Mark Millar's Kick-Ass by way of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, (in the comic it is credited to "Ryan Daranovsky" which is just adorgahhh), which, in the DC Universe, features the Buddy Baker character in the starring role. As this is a standard super-hero comic in 2012, there's only enough room to show what would probably be the first 8 minutes of a movie, and the best thing one can say about it is that it's an incredibly accurate depiction of how fucking mealy mouthed and boring a super-serious film version of Kick-Ass would be; that is also, unsurprisingly, the worst thing one could say about it. The comic drones on for a while in this fashion, and whether you think it's being pretentious by choice (as a way to comment on the disgusting immaturity of a man who chooses ego validation over doing things like "pay child support") or not will be determined by whether or not you actually read the comic in question. Theoretically, there's probably an argument to be made here, but when you put the whole thing under the lens of working human eyes, it becomes rapidly apparent that "being a super-hero" is something that non-pieces of shit stop doing the second some girl barfs their kid out of her vagina.

The Punisher #8
Art by Marco Checchetto & Matt Hollingsworth
Written by Greg Rucka
Published by Marvel Comics

Although this leans so heavily on film tricks that half the reading experience consists of pages of Checchetto drawing zoom effects on dead bodies and plugging up the page with "establishing" shots, it's actually a pretty engaging comic, almost like it's being so in spite of the way everyone involved would apparently be happier storyboarding David Fincher movies. Rucka's take on the Punisher is still an unwelcome return to the stories that get told whenever the character is being written by people who can't shut the fuck up about their own personal disagreements with Frank's horrible (and yet still fictional) worldview--and in this case, it's the old "make the surrounding situational ethics unassailably in Frank's favor, and then spend as much of the comic's page count as possible amongst other characters"--but the comic is still so deeply immersed in that professionals-only landscape that Rucka tends to do best in, and it all sort of works. As long as they keep the Spider-Man types and wistful grandmothers at arm's length, this book has actually gotten pretty decent.

Justice League International #6
Art by Marco Castiello, Dan Jurgens, Vincenzo Acunzo, Hi-Fi
Written by Dan Jurgens
Published by DC Comics

This is probably the purest mediocrity that DC has, a comic so boring that its ideal audience would be found in a locked room containing a Rubbermaid tub of semen with a Tupperware container of ova floating in it, as that way you'd be at an absolute Ground Zero, surrounded on all sides by something that has never had the opportunity to know any better. Even trying to find something in the story to point to as evidence deserving of cruelty is a pain in the ass, this comic, such a slippery eel of banality. Near the end, there's an exciting tease of a moment when a woman in the UN's "Security Group" is depicted wearing a dress seemingly cut from the exact same design that one sees on the United Nations flag, but then there's a close-up drawing and you see that it's just a bunch of little white palm trees (?) on a blue background--still without class, but not as hilarious as one could have hoped for. That sequence also features the funniest part of the comic's script, although it isn't legendary or anything--just a bunch of mid-grade super-heroes making excuses and playing victim for multiple pages. It brings up one of those intermittent questions that arise following the reading of too many super-hero comics: don't regular civilians despise these fucking clowns? Wouldn't they despise them further, to see them whining and passing the buck? Comics or real world, it's the same old song, the reason that girls don't like "nice guys": because desperation and pleading are the ugliest things on the planet, and we've been bred, correctly, to treat weakness with the virulent contempt it very much deserves. Failure is nothing more than that, its failure, and you better hurry up and get married if you want anybody to care that you have a cold and cry sometimes, Booster Gold. Because if there's one thing we've got plenty of, it's another clown with a self-esteem problem and a bunch of fucking gadgets.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

Comics Of The Weak: Don't Call It A Beefcake, He's Been Here For Years

Justice League #5
Art by Jim Lee & Scott Williams
Written by Geoff Johns
Published by DC Comics

Such a miserable experience, reading this comic. It's the narrative equivalent of watching the first episode of that Justice League cartoon in three minute bursts over the course of five months--there's just no way to enjoy that, it's fucking absurd. When you're a kid and you want to hold a boner longer, they tell you to do that exercise where you drape a wet washrag on your shaft and flex it up and down, but they never go so far as to say that you're going to enjoy doing that, or that it's as fun as jerking off, or that you better watch out because you might prefer washrag flexing to putting the thing inside a lady. DC doesn't seem to have ever understood the difference. It's not a surprise that they don't--take a look at the Beat or the Journal's current comment sections, you'll get a plaster cast of what's wrong with comics on both sides--but that doesn't change how tepid and unsatisfying this whole exercise of the Johns/Lee combine has become. Anyway. The Internet says you shouldn't hope people get fired, but honestly, if you just went down the list and got rid of every single person who believes that this comic is worth the four dollars they're asking for it, there's no possible way you wouldn't see an increase in the intelligence average the next time everybody at the staff table pools their "resources" and pours them, like warm oatmeal, into Eddie Berganza's beckoning gullet.

Jennifer Blood #8
Art by Kewber Baal
Written by Al Ewing
Published by Dynamite

Nasty stuff, pretty poorly illustrated for the most part. You can make sense of the art pretty easily, but there's nothing that jumps out as good, the best it ever hopes for is just serviceable. Written relatively well, with some nice Ennis impersonation stuff evenly mixed with what seems to be Ewing's own voice (the "panda" dialog is an excellent line). It's disappointing that one of the most well-regarded of the "new" British writers has to make his entrance into the American market via Dynamite, which is about as good at being a comics publisher as Natalee Holloway is at swimming, but that's just the way of the world in 2012. At least he's got 2000AD--which is currently on a pretty hot streak--to fall back on.

Lone Wolf And Cub: The Message of the Geese & Tale of the Winter Crane
Art by Goseki Kojima
Written by Kazuo Koike
Published by First Comics

"Message of the Geese" is a minor tale, a brief glimpse of the Wolf in battle. It's one of the "features shitting" stories interspersed in the entire saga, a claim to fame that actually isn't all that rare. But beyond the sight of a somewhat constipated Cub forcing out some magic, what sticks in memory most in this brief tale is the momentary compliment paid by the Wolf following his slaughter of a few Yagyu assassins. Upon realizing that one of the Yagyu had sacrificed himself by rushing the Wolf, throwing down his life in hopes that his body might serve as a better launch pad for his partner's attack, the Wolf stops to acknowledge how much like himself the two men were--total dedictation, at less than a moment's notice, to pin all hope, mortal and otherwise, on the missioin, relying on the honor that can only be earned through years of service. It's an excellent moment, one that speaks to one of the saga's greatest strengths: its willingness to embrace the villain.

"Tale of the Winter Crane" is a sneakier story, one whose ending seems always hazily around the corner, only to stop dead with the Wolf (essentially) delivering a "do you know who the fuck I am" speech to a couple of people who don't get it and never will. It's reminscient of that great line at the end of "Mother Russia", when Frank Castle teaches a Delta boy the meaning of the phrase "whatever it takes", made better by the fact that it's delivered with impeccable class by a man who just killed five people with a sword. It's a brief stopover, but a pleasant one.

SFSF2C
By Ryan Cecil Smith

Somewhat reminscient of that Black Jack story where he's brought in to treat a crazy computer, this final installment in Smith's cover version of Matsumoto Leiji's Queen Emeraldas concludes the story the same way it began, with our protagonist musing on a life lived in motion. There's something fascinating about the way the comic depicts space travel as being so empty and "boundless" that it seems as much a philosophical exercise in not going crazy as it is an exercise in just going, anywhere. At the end, this little excursion seems like something that belongs most to its creator (not Matsumoto, but Smith) than it does the audience, and while that isn't a criticism--if anything, this sort of openness to allow an audience inside an obsession should be met with praise--it does underline how exciting it will be to get back to SF proper, a story where the viewing hole is more distinctly made clear.

The Flash #5
By Francis Manapul & Brian Buccellato
Published by DC Comics

In the same way that it's hard not to overpraise Snyder and Capullo's Batman for being the fastest cripple in the polio race, it's hard to ignore that all these current installments of the Flash certainly are a pleasure to look at. There's a delightful strain of homoeroticism running through the current storyline, which is all about contemporary male relationships and great haircuts (without Geoff Johns around to champion conservatism, Manapul has been free to jettison Barry Allen's godawful Right Stuff flattop for a brighter, more pomaded, future). It never feels amatuerish, but one's still left with the nagging feeling that, just maybe, it would if it didn't look so consistently great. For now though, let's just be optimistic and raise a glass to future team-ups with cardigans and soulful brown eyes. That's my kind of rogue's gallery: the kind where the rogues are just some dudes who fuck some other dudes with easily replicatable fashion choices.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

Comics Of The Weak: You Can't Work Off A Fat Personality, Buster Brown

Prophet #21
Art by Simon Roy and Richard Hope His Name Really Is Ballerman
Written by Brandon Graham
Published by Image Comics

A nice mix-up of Rip Van Winkle, Prison Pit and Conan (easier version: a French sci-fi comic), with guest appearances by the horrorshow that the dog becomes in The Thing, Prophet #21 does exactly what it had to do to meet up with the pre-show hype: it works. Delivering tone and building its world, skipping the corny character signifiers and logos that stand in for personalities and motives in the rest of the Image universe was the best move Graham could have made, forcing the reader to move closer to Simon Roy, an artist finished with his Otomo/Gipi phase and setting up shop in the "how would Jesse Marsh draw manga" school of obsesion. It's fun, and it's weird. If that's not your thing, there's plenty of the alternative available.

Wonder Woman #5
Art by Tony Akins & Matthew Wilson
Written by Brian Azzarello
Published by DC Comics

Now that Wonder Woman has successfully made it over the "hope it doesn't get cancelled" hump, isn't it time we address the fact that Hermes is wearing the ugliest sunglasses ever made, sunglasses that are second only to a backwards baseball cap in making a man look like a total toolbag? Even if we ignore his Woodstock '99 era rain poncho--and we really shouldn't ignore that thing, because that's as much a sign of the unfunny side of perversion as it would be if he was driving a white panel van with no windows--we're still five issues into a relationship where the most happening broad in the land has yet to tell her own brother that, oh, you know, he's wearing the same fucking sunglasses that Jerry Sandusky wore everytime he wanted to hide his tired eyes from the harsh light of a world where the rest of us don't fuck children in showers.

Daredevil #8
Written by Mark Waid
Art by Kano & Javier Rodriguez
Published by Marvel Comics

If any title is going to survive Marvel's bizarre creative tailspin, the smart money has to be on Daredevil, a book that's almost quaint with its slow-burn long tale plotting, most of which circles around the possession of a high end flash drive, packed to the gills with evil secrets. Even a tie-in with the Amazing Spider-Man (a series that is taking a short break from one piece of shit story arc so that it can rest its weary, shit-filled bones before it delivers what looks to be another piece of shit story arc) didn't slow it down that much, which comes as a surprise when you consider how little anyone, fictional or otherwise, wants to be around Peter Parker for a length of time more extensive than it would take to stab him in his stupid, stupid whining eyes.

Usagi Yojimbo Volume 6
By Stan Sakai
Published by Fantagraphcis

About half this volume of Usagi is taken up with stories where the samurai rabbit deals with the supernatural, while the other half--a multi part story called "Circles"--concerns itself with the warrior's past, albeit with a supernatural villian thrown in. There's also a quick, predictable one-shot involving a couple of conmen, but don't let the implication of shittiness that the word "predictable" brings with it take hold: there's enough great comic-stuff going on in the story to make up for the fact that you can chart every strand of plot the thing has after reading the first five--maybe four--pages. Sakai's ability to draw a character's motives into their facial features is one of his weirdest and most fascinating talents. It's easy to spot the bad guys in most funny animal comics, and that's why Usagi Yojimbo is a cut above the rest--the complexity on display here in the face of the depressed, one-more-scam swordsmen goes beyond the simple "he's a fox, and foxes are tricky".

"The Duel" is excellent preparation for "Circles", which is all about motives and revelations. Usagi decides to return to his former home, only to walk into another one of those hard-working townspeople versus rapacious bandits settings so popular in samurai fiction. He discovers an old friend and old enemy, both still alive, checks in on his estranged lover (who packs a revelation of her own), the friend-turned-rival that married her, and then there's a nice, long battle that lasts multiple pages without ever seeming the slightest bit self-indulgent. It's a lovely story, and what it lacks in humor (Usagi just isn't funny without Gen or that detective character around) it makes up for in earnest sincerity.

Lone Wolf and Cub: The Inn of the Last Chrysanthemum
Art by Goseki Kojima
Written by Kazuo Koike
Published by First Comics

If someone were to make a graph of the types of Lone Wolf & Cub stories, they'd first break them down into two major categories--the one-off ones where he earns money by killing people, and the ones where the ongoing narrative is pushed towards conclusion. Eventually, the entire book focuses entirely on that second category, all of which build to the most satisfying conclusion to any genre comic book ever published. That's not intended to be hyperbole: it's a statement of fact, albeit one that's only seen meager research. The greats of American genre comics--Eisner and Kirby--never got a chance (some quarters might word that "never took a chance", but not this one, and fuck those people) to play around with conclusions and finality anymore than Shultz, King and Herriman (a few of the greats of the newspaper strip) did. Leaving the question of whether genre requires an ending aside for a moment (a moment that could last an eternity, for how little I care to probe it), "The Inn of the Last Chrysanthemum" rests firmly in that first category described above: this one's all about the money.

One of Koike's most consistent methods of story construction is to focus the reader's attention entirely on the point of view of some new, as of yet unknown to us character. We follow that character through their (often depressing) life, they experience a few flashbacks that explain their current situation, at some point the Wolf and Cub arrive in their orbit, and then the story leads up to an (often violent) conclusion. In many cases, the story takes on an intense sense of danger and heightening panic after the appearance of the Wolf, because while this structure of story often appears in the overall saga, there's never any promise that the story will conclude happily for all we might hope it will. Sometimes the best the Wolf can do is mete out revenge for abuses suffered, other times he can only acknowledge them in word, and on a few occasions (not few enough to where the sting is ever lessened), he can only provide a quick, honorable passing for those whose long-term victimization leaves them unable to find any way forward in the mortal realm. "Chrysanthemum" is on the bleak end of the scale--the only bottom left for its guest protagonist, the "forlorn maiden, forced into a life of shame" is found in a blood drenched garden, and the only satisfaction found is in the bodies that the Wolf piles alongside her own. There's no pretense that it will be enough, but in keeping with Koike's plan, it's made clear: what matters is that debts get paid. What happens next is never our concern.

King-Cat #72
By John Porcellino
Published by John Porcellino

Even if you don't read the opening letter, where Porcellino admits that most of what you're about to read stems from a time period when, busted up by heartbreak and economic collapse, he "didn't do so good", you'd have to be one cold ass son of a bitch--or a non-Porcellino fan out scraping scabs--not to pick up on the general dourness of the whole enterprise. The crippling impact of a Faith Hill song? An out of nowhere "I don't want to be alive anymore" response to a Porcellino-standard observation of natural beauty and the change of seasons? It's not that these sorts of emote-heavy moments are a strange appearance in the guy's work--this is King-Creamballs-Cat we're talking about, feelings are what these little bastards always traffic in, occasionally to an embarrassing degree usually reserved for Thomas Kinkade--it's that they're being delivered in such a raw, unkempt fashion. There's no lesson at the end of this issue, no explanation given, just the implication that survival is the game, the only thing that Porcellino was going for. Each of these documents--even the moment of nostalgia that sees the guy flashing back to the irritating dopiness of youth--concludes on the same note: he made it when everything was coming at him knives out. Not every struggle has a t-shirt phrase to go along with it.

Batman #5
Art by Greg Capullo
Written by Scott Snyder
Published by DC Comics

There's some serious self-indulgence going on here--landscape two page spreads for no purpose beyond the ability to say "hey, look, big", coupled with the demanding notion that you're reading about a secret society of owl-obsessed maze-building super-killers, and yeah, sorry, "owls" IS tougher to swallow than "bats", anybody who tells you different doesn't like super-hero shit in the first place--but that aside, this is actually a good little Batman comic. It doesn't deserve the over-the-top praise that it's gotten, but at the same time, it's totally understandable why that praise has been so hyperbolic: this has been the shittiest group of Batman titles in a long time. Having a decent issue show up, an issue that sees a plot humming forward with solid illustration to boot--that's going to get some knees buckling, especially amongst those who have been plugging their quarters into the super-hero slot machine since this New 52 thing started. But don't get too worked up: you've never met anyone who is going to read this thing twice, and you never will.

Thunderbolts #169
Art by Kev Walker, Tery Pallot & Frank Martin Jr.
Written by Jeff Parker
Published by Marvel Comics

Time traveling away from Marvel's bone dry continuity and hanging out amongst King Arthur, violence, Merlin, and lots and lots of titties--if you're using the word breasts to describe what Kev Walker's drawing, you really don't fucking get it and probably never will--Thunderbolts #169 (god bless them for keeping the inane numbering of this series) is one of those totally enjoyable comics that probably shouldn't get mentioned on a blog, because that's a sure fire way to see the thing get cancelled the next time Marvel wants to do one of their periodical "how can we fuck up the thing that people like and want to buy" (see the Amazing Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Force for examples, look under the paragraph heading "Really Shitty Art"). But hey, why not tempt fate?

-Tucker Stone, 2012