COOL SHIT 3-15-12

CROSSED: BADLANDS #1: Garth Ennis returns to the book he launched for Avatar. Once again, we have a new band of survivors, a new group of people to get to know before Ennis ruthlessly murders them. This time out, he runs into a problem he created for Lapham and Spurrier on their series: he has to one-up everything that has come before. Ennis is up to the task; in the most horrifying scene, he has a Crossed driving a car and throwing a living baby at someone. The baby splatters all over the place, and since Jacen Burrows has also returned to illustrate, we get to see the gory results. Good times ahead, folks. Good times.

G.I. JOE: INFESTATION #1: Fuck me. This kind of surprised me. Something good is actually coming from IDW’s stupid INFESTATION cross-over. Cobra finds a Mythos relic and they’re trying to figure out how to use it to kill people. The best part: watching Interrogator go among his patients, insane Cobra soldiers who are no longer fit to serve. Good stuff.

ANGEL AND FAITH #7: So Drusilla is sane for the first time in centuries, and she wants to help Angel forget about all the evil things he’s done in his life, to make him a better person. Angel rebels against the idea, as would any intelligent human being. Who wants to take away things that make one human? Faith’s father has also showed up, and he seems to have good intentions, as he’s been sober for six months. Yet . . . it looks like he has other intentions. Things are getting very interesting here.

LOCKE AND KEY: CLOCKWORKS #5: Now we finally know what turned Dodge into the monster we first met at the bottom of the well. Well, not the whole story, but we know that Rendell used the Head Key on him and removed all memories of the Door. Dodge turns into a complete dick, so much so it hurts. Poor Ellie’s heart is absolutely destroyed because of it. To top things off, Joe Hill throws in another surprise: Rendell’s ghostly mother is hanging out in the well house. Weird. 8 ISSUES TO GO.

COOL SHIT 1-26-12

THE WALKING DEAD #93: We’re still in kind of a lull, as this is just the beginning of a new storyline, but it seems like things are going to heat up really fast. Just when you start thinking Rick is turning a new leaf, that he’s finally going to be less psycho than he’s been for the past 70-ish issues, he pulls some paranoid violence out of his ass and quite possibly fucks up any chance of getting civilization up and running again. It’s slowly starting to dawn on me that no matter how fucked up things get, Rick and his crew might actually be the villains of this book. What a horrifying concept!

TRANSFORMERS: ROBOTS IN DISGUISE #1: The sister book to MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE starts out with Cybertron in a horrible mess. Prowl has left the Decepticons in charge of keeping the peace, and to control them, he’s installed a device in all of them. If they misbehave, he can make their heads explode. Of course, them being Decepticons, they take their duties too far and essentially become stormtroopers. In the meantime, Bumblebee is stuck between his duties, making things work with the Decepticons, and trying to bring the expat Transformers into the fold. Things are clearly not working, especially since most people think he murdered Rodimus Prime and hundreds of others for political reasons. He does not help matters by using Prowl’s device to blow up a Decepticon’s head. And with Ratbat in the middle of it all, being his usual politician self, one suspects Bumblebee’s attempts at leadership will be run right off the rails.

ANGEL AND FAITH #6: This book has been good, but not great . . . until now. In this issue, through a flashback, we get to see some of Giles’s past, about his training to become a Watcher. It’s kind of interesting, because very few fans have probably considered the trials he had to go through to become the man he was before Angel cruelly murdered him at the end of season 8 of BUFFY. It’s very easy to see how he became Ripper during his teenage years. In addition to this, we finally get to meet Faith’s father (which should turn out pretty interesting), and Drusilla is back . . . and sane?!

AMERICAN VAMPIRE #23: DUDE! SKINNER SWEET LIVES! I now have a reason to continue reading this book! It’s odd, seeing as how it looked pretty obvious that he’d died in World War II, but here he is, in the ‘Fifties, being pursued by Travis, whose parents he’d killed. Travis is actually a pretty interesting character in his own right. After witnessing the deaths of his parents and growing up in a loony bin, he’s made a life out of hunting vampires . . . and biting them back. Even though he’s got a gun that shoots wooden bullets (in lieu of carrying stakes), he has a set of fangs he wears so he can actually bite offending vampires. How quirky is that?! This is quickly becoming my favorite story arc of this entire series.