Category: Entertainment

Story by Andy Hartnell
Art by Chris Bolson

Having lost the Necronomicon to an African warlord during a retrieval mission, Abbey Chase and the Danger Girl organization have followed their only lead – a page from the cursed book itself depicting an unknown man’s face – to a federal prison where their target is being held. The perfect sort of place for Abbey’s associate Sydney Savage to infiltrate…

After a far too lengthy introduction to Sydney, issue 3 of this franchise crossover finally leads into what we’ve been waiting for all along: a member of Danger Girl meeting up with Ash for the first time. Hartnell is clearly very comfortable with the Danger Girl characters; their dialogue is smooth with just the right hint of cheeseball, and their interactions carry the coolness that has always been the series’ appeal.

Ash, on the other hand, seems clumsily handled here. Although he’s meant to be a bumbling idiot, somehow his dialogue comes across immature rather than funny or goofy. He never feels quite like the dumbass turned badass he’s supposed to be, and never really captures the Bruce Campbell flair that made him so popular in the first place.

Sadly, Bolson’s art only adds to this effect. While he has a solid grasp on Abbey and company, Ash is inconsistently rendered throughout the book, never really feeling like the Ash we know and love. The artwork in the book is otherwise solid (although at times the colors are a little overdone), especially during the action-heavy sequences.

Overall, you’ll get what you expect out of this book. It’s a campy mash up of two diametrically opposed franchises that come together unexpectedly well, with a few stumbles in Ash’s portrayal. Danger Girl and the Army of Darkness is an entertaining throwaway, and worth at least one read-through.

Story by Doug Murray & Frank Cho
Art by Axel Medellin

In the final issue of the 50 Girls 50 limited series, the women of the ESS Savannah open a wormhole to return home, only to find it occupied by an alien craft with which they are destined to collide. The lead-up to the collision is suitably tense, but everything that comes afterward is a jumbled mess of hackneyed dialogue and awful fiction-science.

The second half of the issue is filled with half-explained teasers, undoubtedly meant to drive readers to the hopeful ongoing series. Unfortunately these teasers lack intrigue, instead serving to frustrate and alienate. The end of the book is wholly unsatisfying, failing to provide any unifying thread to the random, one-off fight-fests of issues 1 through 3, and offering no closure to the crew’s story whatsoever.

Perhaps the worst offense of 50 Girls 50 was the almost offensive character arc of the Savannah’s crew. In issue 3 we’re given a glimpse into their seemingly power-mad view of their mission, only to have that viewpoint reinforced here as though it’s unfailingly correct. None of the women in the book think to question the mindset of their captain or Oksana, which makes them not only two-dimensional, but completely unsympathetic.

Even Medellin’s art, which I thought was excellent in the first issue, has steadily declined over the course of the series, feeling more and more rushed and sloppy. Where he initially succeeded in differentiating characters through unique attributes, his figures are now almost identically constructed and his facial expressions so muddied that his women are now defined by their hair color and styles.

Although 50 Girls 50 started as a potentially interesting sci-fi adventure with a unique twist, each issue of its four-issue run has quickly marked it as nothing more than a disappointing, monster-of-the-month schlock-fest.

Story by Sam Sarkar
Art by Garrie Gastonny

After excavating an ancient sarcophagus from the Sable Island pit, Dr. Gabrielle Page and her crew have discovered that its contents are not what they expected. This quickly leads members of Gabrielle’s team to take sides in the heated disagreement about how to proceed.

Sarkar effectively portrays a group of morally ambiguous characters whose motives are largely undefined, which leaves the reader scratching their head about who can be trusted. Unfortunately, this also has the side effect of making it difficult to know who to care about. When characters are put into jeopardy, the tension tends to fall a little flat without knowing who to root for.

As with any story of found horrors, a balance must be struck between environmental dangers and the perils of human interaction under extreme pressure. Sarkar does an admirable job finding this equilibrium, but a few characters’ reactions toward the middle of the book feel forced and somewhat unnatural.
This is also where the story falls apart, if only a little bit. After a major event changes the situation for everyone involved (I’m trying my best to avoid spoilers), I feel like the script gets very choppy, rushing to the end of the book and skipping around too much in the process.

The realism that Gastonny’s linework infuses into his characters is exceptional, and at times almost takes a back seat to his equally realistic environments. Where the script may fail at endearing these characters to me, the art succeeds at making them relatable and unique. The artwork is this book’s biggest draw.

Although The Vault is very reminiscent of other tales like The Abyss and Leviathan, I’m intrigued enough to follow it through to the end and see where Sarkar’s taking me.

Story by Kevin McCarthy
Art by Paolo Pantalena

Epoch tells the tale of a popped-collar action hero caught in the middle of the age old conflict between fiery blue demons and super-goateed angels in their battle for supremacy on earth. The story centers around Jonah, a New York detective investigating a series of grisly murders who finds out quickly that there’s more to this case than he could have imagined.

While McCarthy’s writing isn’t bad, there’s nothing really special about it either. He neither inundates the reader with exposition nor trusts them to figure things out, which makes the comic read strangely like a textbook. There are parts where a great deal of text could have been removed (like a pursuit scene where Jonah recaps the whole first half of the book), and doing so would have streamlined the story into something more entertaining than informative.

Anyone familiar with Top Cow knows what they’re getting artistically. In this case, Paolo Pantalena’s art is a solid mix of Turner-esque action and manga stylings ala Udon. Pantalena’s a decent enough artist, but his style just doesn’t fit this story. Every car’s a Lamborghini, every gun’s a high-tech paramilitary weapon, and don’t get me started on Jonah’s Ming The Merciless jacket. The writing here would have been better served by a more grounded, even gritty style.

I feel like I’ve seen this cookie-cutter approach to Heavenly conflict a few too many times. While reading Epoch, it reminded me of how a manga might approach The Prophecy, and by the time I finished it I just wanted to go watch The Prophecy.

Story by Cullen Bunn
Art by Tyler Crook

After the cliffhanger ending of issue #13, the latest issue of The Sixth Gun steps away from the main storyline to give us a glimpse at the origins of our newest villain, the 9-foot living mummy known as Asher Cobb.

Anything that builds the mythos of The Sixth Gun’s world is a welcome addition. Cullen Bunn deftly weaves his flashback tale into the current storyline, giving us even more insight into the events that preceded the current issue. After reading #14 I couldn’t help but re-read the current arc, and found a whole new layer to the events that unfolded on the Hidden Railway.

The world that our heroes inhabit deepens with each bit of canon that Bunn builds into it, which ratchets up the tension at every turn. Even though the issue doesn’t really address what’s happened to Drake at the end of the train battle, it calls into question much of what we’ve seen in the Bound storyline, setting up a fascinating left-turn in the plot.

Tyler Crook (of Petrograd and B.P.R.D fame) takes over artistic duties from Brian Hurtt for this issue. While I enjoyed Crook’s style here, I feel that it lacked some of Hurtt’s dynamism at times. Overall I think his art is well-suited to the storyline, but some of his looser renderings felt a bit awkward. Maybe Hurtt’s art has just become so synonymous with the series that I honestly have trouble judging Crook without direct comparison.

Issue #14’s detour was an oddly welcome one. Normally I’d be bothered by stepping away from the main story at such a crucial point, but in this case it adds depth and intrigue to Drake and Becky’s adventure.

Story by Jason Rubin
Art by Tyler Kirkham

Shortly into the latest issue of Mysterious Ways, our main character Sam utters the phrase “None of this makes any sense…”. This turns out to be an accurate (and prophetic) statement, since the rest of the issue is a jumbled hodgepodge of barely related imagery, full of clichés and red herrings.

The first issue’s plot was simple: Sam is a loser at the end of his luck who gets half-accused of a murder, and spends the rest of the issue running from the cops with some confusingly random teasers thrown in. The second issue almost completely re-hashes the plot of the first, in such aggravating fashion that I felt I was reading the same comic over again.

There’s little to nothing likeable about Sam or any of his surrounding cast members, and the attempts to build intrigue – like the pieces of an artifact that were introduced so poorly that we don’t even know how they came into Sam’s possession – simply result in eye rolling disappointment.

I’m equally disappointed with Tyler Kirkham’s artwork. His style is still couched in a mid-‘90’s aesthetic that forgoes simplicity for over-inking and excessive line work, substituting actual detail with swaths of cross-hatching and scribbles. The framework is fundamentally sound, but it’s buried under a clutter of needless rendering.

Recently, I rather harshly judged individual issues of Kurtis Weibe’s Green Wake for a perceived randomness that left the reader more befuddled than entertained. The conclusion of Green Wake’s first arc redeemed the narrative as a whole, even in light of the failings of individual issues. All we can hope is that the same is true of Mysterious Ways, but I’m less optimistic, and can’t recommend picking any of it up before it’s finished.