With DMZ, Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli have created one of the best comics of this decade. While it’s just as good as Y: The Last Man or 100 Bullets, DMZ is almost patriotic, albeit in a very subversive way.

The story takes place in an alternate-present or near-future setting, whichever makes you more comfortable. An army calling themselves the Free States and espousing a return to the true democratic principles of America has come from the Midwest. On the other side of the line is the incumbent, the good ol’ United States of America, which goes about things just as you’d expect our current administration to. Continue reading “DMZ: America’s Second Civil War”

Even for a guy who lost his wife in a bomb set up to kill him, was burned alive during the explosion and reemerged as a man whose primary fear should be Weed-B-Gon, the [debatably] “former” Alec Holland has it pretty rough. All the while, during his transformation, his wife was shot to death. Fast forward and we have a similar scenario occurring just a few years later. He’s been run out of his home, cornered down and shot, only to be left for the dead (again) but then cryogenically frozen by some G-Men, only to be dissected by Jason Woodrue (aka the Floronic Man, whom the Feds have on loan from prison). Woodrue, like Holland, is a botanist and has a plant form. The difference is that the Floronic Man has a believable and easily achievable human appearance. He literally sprays on artificial skin and shaves the facial hair-reminiscent wooden protusions from his face.

As if my introduction to the Swamp Thing could not get any more depressing, the pathos that – from what I’ve come to comprehend is at the core of Moore’s version – gets magnified when Woodrue discovers that the Swamp Thing is not Holland at all; he is just a collection of plant cells that think they’re Alec Holland, fused with his memories and therefore human. While conducting an autopsy on our hero, Woodrue (being as highly regarded a genius as Holland was), discovers that all of Swamp Thing’s organs are merely non-functioning replicas of human versions. He concludes that all human traces of Holland are gone! Continue reading “Swamp Thing Vol 1: Saga of the Swamp Thing”

Sandman: Midnight Theatre

Vertigo Comics

I’ll be honest. When Neil Gaiman reveals he was just twenty-four when he began writing for DC and that most of the scribing he did was after midnight, I felt a connection since I am also twenty-four. I also attempted to give his stories some justice by only reading through them late at night, but I haven’t been making it to midnight. I’ve been crashing early and reading Days around 11:30 p.m. at the latest.

Nonetheless, Days, a mulligan’s stew of sorts, was written early in Gaiman’s career and contains several stories, the first few of which occur in the Swamp Thing comics magazine. Ever since I saw a cover of SWAMP THING #34, lovingly painted by Stephen Bissette, when I was twelve, I had wanted to read a Swamp Thing story. The image’s romanticism sucked me in with both an anti-traditional superhero quality and a fiercely trusting human quality, even though Swamp Thing’s costume is his ever-evolving plant matter construction and only resembles the human form in profile. Continue reading “Midnight Days: A Taste of Neil Gaiman’s Early Work”

Although it has been many years since I could actually consider myself a fan or avid reader of comic books, there have recently been released a number of books that have attracted my attention and drawn me back into the world of comics. One of the most original and engrossing storylines was created by Brian K. Vaughn, writer, and Pia Guerra, penciler. Their brainchild, Y: The Last Man, is an ongoing series that was first released in comic book format in 2002 and which is currently available in collected book format.

Y tells the story of an ordinary—and unemployed—young man with a flare for escape artistry (Yorick) and his male capuchin monkey companion (Ampersand), whom Yorick is training to be a helper monkey. As the story begins, a phone conversation between Yorick in New York and his girlfriend, Beth, who is vacationing/studying in Australia, is cut short as all of the human males around the world—as well as most, if not all, males of any other species—suddenly and instantaneously collapse and die, most bleeding from all of their orifices. Both Yorick and Ampersand miraculously survive the “gendercide” and begin their journey to find Beth and, hopefully, some answers. As one might guess, the “Y” refers to the y chromosome that is necessary to produce a male during pregnancy (xx=female; xy=male). Continue reading “Y: The Last Man”

By Dave Ginolfi

When this book was first given to me to check out i was excited but for some reason it lay stagnant in the back seat of my car for months. There it lived amongst cd’s and empty bags of fast food from late night hunger raids. What a diamond in the rough it truly became.

I was in a position where I desperately needed reading material. I was in the waiting room at a dentist’s office. With nothing but 101.3 The Rose and the smell of old people to occupy my time I decided to get sucked into a colorful world that reminded me of the Lion King with a twist of Steven King.

This book was so vivid if read fast enough it seemed to come to life. That’s also it’s only flaw – its length. Although it’s short, it’s also very fulfilling but getting close to the characters is hard as it comes abruptly to an end. Continue reading “Pride of Baghdad: Ain’t No Pride When You’re Dead”