GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #151: DEATH OF A WIP

If you are a fellow author, and you have been in my presence for longer than a half an hour, you're probably aware of my unending battle with the novel I'm currently writing. I've been kicking this beast for many, many months, and it just doesn't want to work for me. Every time I sit down, getting a mere 100 words is agonizing. Nothing wants to move forward. It just wants to marinate in a stand-still.


This sucks because I like the characters a lot, and I think it's an interesting situation. It's a vampire book, but I think I do some different things with the undead. That's what's killing me the most: I LIKE THIS BOOK. But it just doesn't want to come out of my head. I know where I'm going with it, but it just doesn't want to get there.


I've been beating the shit out of myself trying to figure out why that was, and today I think I have my answer. This book has no soul. It has no soul because it has no purpose.


Alan Moore once said that you should always have a purpose when you write something, and I agree with him. It doesn't have to be front and center, but it should be there. I write entertaining (I hope) stories, and if someone wants to peek around for a deeper meaning, it's there for them to find.


It's not there for this WIP. As a result, the whole thing seems hollow to me, and that's why it's fighting me so hard. I'm just going to have to lay this one to rest. Maybe I'll come back to it someday, if I finally figure out what to do with it, but for now? I have to move on to something else.


This blows. I wish I'd figured this out almost 50,000 words ago. I lost so much time on this, it shames me. It's like trying to fix up a car that Bigfoot rolled over.


That's all right, I guess. [He said without making eye contact.] I have other projects I've been working on. There's one that's been sitting on my backburner for a looooong time. Sometimes I write something to figure out how I stand on a particular topic, or how I would react if something were to happen to me. I've got a doozy like that on my mind, so I think I'll work on that instead.


RIP, vampire WIP. Or maybe not. Vampires tend to rise again, don't they?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #88: COMIC BOOK READER

In the wake of the new season of COMIC BOOK MEN, I feel the need to talk about my love of comic books. Since I started reviewing comic books for the Elmhurst College LEADER in 1998, I've been considered a comic book reader. To be fair, I did this long before. I loved comics when I was a kid, and I didn't stop until Marvel's incarnation of THE TRANSFORMERS ended, much to my chagrin. Years later, CJ, a friend I'd met during my senior year of high school, got me back into comics with EVIL ERNIE, PREACHER and HITMAN. Three years later, I was writing reviews for the LEADER as the first comic book reviewer EVER on staff. My time there won me an award from the Chicago TRIBUNE. (I got two, actually, but I only got one for my comic book work.)


Still, whenever I mention my love of comic books, people assume I'm talking about superheroes. This pisses me off a great deal, because not all comic books are about superheroes. In fact, I don't like superheroes. I know, that's blasphemy in this age of Marvel movies. Let me make myself clear: I love the superhero movies, but I can't stand the superhero comic books. I'm not condemning those books. It's a matter of taste. I don't like them, but I don't hate people who like them. That's your business, not mine.


I don't really read superhero comic books. The only time I do is when a writer I respect is writing them. There are a handful of great superhero stories, I think. One of them is obviously WATCHMEN. Another is THE BOYS, which is one of the greatest comic books ever written. I loved Mark Millar's take on OLD MAN LOGAN. The same goes for David Morrell's take on SAVAGE WOLVERINE. And then there's books like Brian Azzarello's WONDER WOMAN and so on and so forth.


But ultimately, those aren't the books I'm interested in, aside from THE BOYS. I think superheroes are stupid. I find it's a fucking shame that the average person isn't aware that comic books are more than some person wearing skintight underwear facing off against criminal/evil alien villains. I want PREACHER. I want TRANSMETROPOLITAN. I want 100 BULLETS. And yes, I want LOCKE & KEY. How about AMERICAN VAMPIRE? Or DICKS? Or CROSSED? Or THE FADE OUT? Or CRIMINAL or FATALE? FBP? SAGA? SEX CRIMINALS? STRAY BULLETS? TREES? How about DORK and MILK AND CHEESE? I could go on forever, but most average people, whenever they think of comic books, will think about Superman, Batman, the X-Men, Spider-Man and whoever else wears spandex tight enough to show the shape of their genitals.


I love Tommy Monaghan, one of the few guys in the old DCU who took the piss out of superheroes on a regular basis. He puked on Batman and showed how Green Lantern was a cheapskate. Or how about THE BOYS, who policed the degenerate supes?


But . . . the loyal fans of HITMAN remember very well that there was one superhero who had earned Tommy's trust: Superman. And just like that, I can appreciate certain things about the comic book superheroes.


Whenever someone brings something cool into the Stash on COMIC BOOK MEN, I can truly appreciate it. I'm wowed. I'm very interested to see how these things turn out, because they're historical documents.


But let's be honest. Superheroes should have died out long ago. Marvel manages to keep them alive, for the most part. I don't like a lot of their methods, but they have their hearts in the right place. DC, on the other hand, has driven their titles into the ground. They don't know what the fuck they're doing. If their BATMAN/SUPERMAN movie succeeds, it will only be because people were curious enough to see it. Not because it's great, though.


Some superheroes are immortal, and that's fine. Those who aren't should have been released a while ago. The Big Two work constantly to reinvent these characters, but in all honesty, I think they should just be released. If they continue with new people behind the mask, then it's the same ol' bullshit as ever. If there's a reboot, no matter how much you change it, it's still the same ol' bullshit as ever. If you let these characters die? They can serve a narrative purpose.


Reboots only serve as commercial agents. Actually killing characters off would serve stories very well. Not like I give a shit. Just give me my non-superhero books, and I'll be satisfied.


But what the fuck do I care? You guys fuck around with your superhero comics, and I'll stay over here with the other stuff. Goodnight, fuckers.

EVERYONE'S GOT ONE #21: THE FINAL WORD ON BEFORE WATCHMEN

[SORRY IT TOOK SO LONG TO POST THIS.  IT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED RIGHT AFTER THE SERIES ENDED.  C2E2 COVERAGE GOT IN THE WAY OF THAT, SO I’M PROBABLY TOO LATE TO THIS PARTY.]

When I first heard that DC was going to do BEFORE WATCHMEN, I think my reaction was the same as everyone else’s:  WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU DO THAT?  WATCHMEN is perfect on its own.  Why would you cheapen it with a marketing ploy like that?

But of course, I was curious.  I had to find out what it was really like.  It boggled my mind that there were so many different titles dedicated to this.  It seemed like overkill to me, and it just reeked of sales desperation.

Now that the whole thing is over, I can say that it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  DC put some of their best writers on this project, from Brian Azzarello to Darwyn Cooke to Len Wein to J. Michael Straczynski.  If they absolutely had to do this project, at least they did it as well as they could.  Sure, it was nothing more than a scheme to make more money off a prestigious title, but at least they didn’t half-ass it.  They really wanted to make this the best they could.

That doesn’t mean it was good.  But it was better than expected.

The 

worst had to be NITE OWL.  Let’s face it, Dan Dreiberg isn’t an interesting guy in his prime.  He only becomes interesting when he’s a fat has-been who has a difficult time getting it up when he’s not in the suit.  As a superhero in his prime, he’s completely bland.  He did not need his own book, especially since it had very little to do with the direction the others were taking.

Truthfully, I didn’t care for “The Curse of the Crimson Corsair” feature at the back of almost every book.  It seems to only exist to fill in for the “Tales of the Black Freighter.”  There is very little creativity there.  It looked pretty neat, but there was very little substance there.

SILK SPECTRE was all right.  Again, it didn’t tie in with the direction of the others, but it was kind of cool as a stand-alone.  You already know my thoughts on the DOLLAR BILL one-shot.  MINUTEMEN was actually a cool concept, filling in some details that were left out of the original WATCHMEN.  OZYMANDIAS was a bit plain for my likes, although the layouts knocked me the fuck out.

However, DR. MANHATTAN was pretty interesting.  At first, I thought they were going to use this book to change the original WATCHMEN story, which I would have been furious about.  Luckily, it didn’t go that way.  Like with OZYMANDIAS, the layouts were pretty impressive.

The big surprise was how disappointing RORSCHACH was for me.  It was cool to see Rorschach in action, but it was almost a throwaway story.  It didn’t bring anything new to the table.  It tried to explain a bit why he is the way he is, but the thing is, we already have enough information to determine that.

On the other hand, MOLOCH brought a lot of cool shit to the table.  It is easily my second favorite.  We don’t get a lot of him in the original WATCHMEN, so it’s good to get his back story.

My favorite?  COMEDIAN, of course.  There was so much going on with this book that after a while, it might even be easy to see him as the main character of the WATCHMEN universe, even though he dies in the first few pages of Alan Moore’s graphic novel.  Azzarello brought the most to the table with this one.

All in all, I think it was worth my money.  Not much more than that, though.  There is one big concern, though.  You know how sometimes, people get into an argument over how a newcomer should watch STAR WARS?  Some people are of the opinion that you should watch the original trilogy first before the newer one.  Others say you should watch it in order.

With WATCHMEN, there is no way you should read BEFORE WATCHMEN first.  I hope no one gets the impression that they should start with BEFORE.  There are waaaaaay too many spoilers in BEFORE for something like that.  These books were intended to be read after one reads WATCHMEN.

Here’s the thing:  WATCHMEN is perfectly contained within itself.  We don’t need a BEFORE WATCHMEN because Moore already gave us that in the flashbacks.  BEFORE WATCHMEN relied far too heavily on material that originated in WATCHMEN.  A lot of shit was repeated.  Ultimately, this was an exercise in futility.  But it was just good enough in the end to open my wallet.

Is it shameless in its exploitation of the original book?  Yes.  But at least you get some kind of return on that.  Should BEFORE WATCHMEN exist?  Probably not.  The only motive the company had was to make more money.  The writers and artists did their best to give it artistic merit, and they came really close to succeeding.

What do you think?  Let me know in the comments below.

C2E2 2013 PANELS: AVATAR PRESS

Big surprise:  the trend continues, and Avatar Press panels remain very small affairs.  There couldn’t have been more than 20 people in the room, including me.  Here’s the big disappointment:  Mike Wolfer couldn’t make it.  He was too busy working on Max Brooks’s new book, EXTINCTION PARADE.

That left us with one of Avatar’s executives, Jim Kuhoric, the creative director.  That’s right, a one-man panel.  Remember my first year, when they had Wolfer, Jacen Burrows, Brian Pulido, and William Christensen?  How awesome was that?  And now we just get Kuhoric?

Let me be clear, I liked the guy.  He was very nice.  But he tended to be a bit monotone, unless someone asked him a question which amused him.  Not a good way to get across your plans for the next year.

Regardless of his delivery, he did bring us lots and lots of news.  Oh yeah, I mentioned that Max Brooks has a new book with them, right?  EXTINCTION PARADE, which is going to be out on June 19, a day before the WORLD WAR Z movie is released.  Its Brooks’s take on zombies vs. vampires, but it’s not as cheap as it sounds.  He’s working with a lot of social commentary, according to Kuhoric, so it should be pretty interesting.  It’s based on a short story Brooks wrote, and it’s going to be 11 issues long.

Kuhoric talked about UBER from Kieron Gillen.  For those who don’t know, it’s about what would happen if Germany came up with actual supermen before the end of the war, and how that changes the outcome.  Kuhoric says that it doesn’t just automatically show Germany winning the war, but just how that CHANGES the war and the nature of reality.  Personally, I didn’t care for UBER, but we’ll see where it goes.

Speaking of Gillen, he’s also got another book coming out from Avatar called THE HEAT, but Kuhoric didn’t talk much about it.

Remember when Avatar worked with George R.R. Martin a while ago?  Well, he’s got a new book coming out from them called SKIN TRADE, based on the novella he wrote a while ago.  Many of you probably don’t remember, but it was published in NIGHT VISIONS 5, otherwise known as THE SKIN TRADE with short stories by Stephen King and Dan Simmons, as well.  It’s an amazing volume, even though I’m of the opinion that Martin’s piece is the weakest of the bunch.  Kuhoric also suggested that Martin might cover superheroes after this one.

Finally!  Two years ago, they announced a follow up to Christos Gage’s ABSOLUTION, which would be called ABSOLUTION:  RUBICON.  Well, that kind of dropped off the face of the earth.  Good news!  It’s coming soon!  And in one throwaway remark, Kuhoric mentioned something about Gage working on CROSSED, so it would seem that he’s the next writer on the BADLANDS series.

Looking for more Alan Moore news?  It looks like he’s teamed up with Jacen Burrows on another Lovecraft project, this one called PROVIDENCE.  It’s being advertised as a follow-up to NEONOMICON.

Here is a bit of unexpected news:  Boundless, the imprint Avatar publishes LADY DEATH and WAR GODDESS under, has been put on hiatus.  I suppose it’s not performing as well as they’d like, and they’re reevaluating everything.  It will return soon with new LADY DEATH and a few other titles that Kuhoric couldn’t discuss at this time.

They also announced that they would soon have issues available from Comixology, if that’s your thing.

And then there’s CROSSED, but you already know about the webisodes coming soon from Garth Ennis, and the new webcomic, not to mention the one they actually have going on right now.  Actually, this segment turned into Garth Ennis news, rather than CROSSED news.  He’ll have a new SF book coming out from them soon that is supposed to be ALIEN-ish.  There’s also a war story, which I suspect is the submarine story he mentioned at a Dynamite panel two years ago.  And there’s another book, too, something that is along the lines of Evan Dorkin’s BEASTS OF BURDEN.  I don’t know if I like the sounds of that last one, but he handled the talking rabbit in THE CHRONICLES OF WORMWOOD pretty well, so . . . .

By this point, we’d reached the Q&A session, and most of the questions were about how people could submit work to Avatar.  But there were some interesting questions.  One person asked about the two incomplete Warren Ellis series.  Kuhoric jokingly said that Ellis still owes them scripts, but they would really like to continue working with him.  Someone else asked him if they ever received hate mail due to the extreme nature of their work.  They very rarely get such correspondence, and Kuhoric thinks it’s mainly because people who pick up an Avatar book know what they’re going to get.

And then there were my questions.  I asked him who he would want to work on CROSSED, if he had the choice.  He said there were a few writers and artists he couldn’t talk about at this point, but he’d really like to see what Tim Seeley would do on the book.  I also mentioned that the most extreme thing I’d ever seen outside of Avatar was Howard Chaykin’s work on his BLACK KISS titles.  Since BLACK KISS 2 came out late last year, I asked if Avatar tried to get the title.  They did.  They would love to work with Chaykin, considering how Harlan Ellison-esque he is.  The man speaks his mind without fear, which means he’d be a perfect fit for Avatar.

Then I asked if there was anything Avatar wouldn’t put in their books.  He didn’t think so.  They’d never turned down something in the past for being too extreme.  This led to a question about the CROSSED videogame I’d heard about two years ago.  Yes, they still wanted to do it, but there is nothing going on in regards to it at this time.  Kuhoric thinks videogame companies are afraid of something like this, and fair enough.  If there was an outcry over GRAND THEFT AUTO 3, CROSSED might crack the world in two.  At one point, Kuhoric glanced around the room, looking for children.  When he found none, he said, “What would the weapons be for a game like that?  Would you be able to kill people with a horse cock?”

Yes.  Once again, horse cock has been mentioned at an Avatar panel, and I couldn’t be happier.

Which reminds me, you better fucking believe that I asked about the new DICKS books.  Finally, it can be said:  DICKS 3 is happening.  A few issues are even finished, but at this time, it’s not on the schedule.

And that’s it.  So yeah, we have a lot to look forward to from Avatar Press.  If you’re not onboard with them yet, what the fuck are you doing reading this?  Get on CROSSED, CALIGULA, DICKS, FERALS, DAN THE UNHARMABLE, and everything else that they publish.  Do so immediately.  They’re doing some of the best work in the industry at this time.

P.S.  Every time I see William Christensen, I try to get an interview with him.  Sadly, he was not there this year.  Not that I expected to finally score the interview, but I would have liked to at least try.  The guy has an amazing eye for talent, and something tells me his sensibilities run in the exact same direction as mine.  I think such an interview would have been a showstopper.

FORGOTTEN COMIC BOOKS #3: STRAW MEN

When I was a very young comic book reader, I bought STRAW MEN #1 from a bargain bin. I thought the cover looked pretty cool, and I liked THEM!, so I thought it would make for good reading. Surprise, surprise, it turned out to be much more than a good read; it was fucking awesome. Writers Michael Vance and R.A. Jones wrote about things that comic books didn’t really go into in those days. Alan Moore was just starting to stretch the idea of what comic books could do. It was very adult stuff, but also super-intelligent and very socially relevant.



I had to have more. Unfortunately, no matter how far and wide I shopped, I couldn’t find any subsequent issues. Time moved on, years stretched, and so on and so forth. Fresh out of college, I learned about the INTERNET. I also learned that Mile High Comics had an online store, and they had just about everything. That included issues 2-8 of STRAW MEN. The entire series was finally in my grasp, and it was just as kick-ass as I thought it would be. Even more.


Contained within these eight issues is a story that stretches across decades. It all begins in a shit-splat Oklahoma burg, Gate, and the Experimental Atomic Plant One. This is where Dr. Jon Stonewall conducts his experiments in an attempt at genetically engineering the perfect human being, a person free of mutation and sickness. He’s got pretty good reasons for doing this, considering his son was born with a defect that made his left hand look like a jumbled mess.


Craig Stonewall, the aforementioned son, is the protagonist of this story. In his father’s eyes, he’s more than just physically defective. Jon sees Craig as a weakling, someone who stagnates in whatever misery he feels he’s in rather than doing something about it. He wants to make a man out of Craig more than almost anything else.


And this is very clear to Craig, who harbors a lifelong hatred of his father as a result. However, Jon is right about most of these things, even though Craig denies it. Yet Craig’s hatred with Jon is not unwarranted, either. His father will go to any lengths to ensure that his will is done, and that includes manipulation and murder.


Even more so, it includes the formation of political and religious organizations. Jon is the puppet master behind the Primacy Party and the Primacy Church (despite being a confessed atheist). Both have goals to bring human beings to perfection through scientific experimentation. Both also give Jon an incredible amount of support through money to fund said experiments. In charge of both organizations is the good-intentioned Robert Hughes, who believes this is what God wants, and he’s got his eye on the White House . . . . But Jon knows how willful his puppet can be, so he makes sure he has something with which to blackmail Hughes: an orgy that Jon orchestrated just so he could videotape the good reverend in a compromising position.


Have I mentioned that Jon has no trouble in experimenting with his son’s pregnant wife? In fact, that’s how the real story begins, with Carol in labor, and Craig speeding toward the EAP1, which has now been converted to Gate’s medical center. Craig worries in the waiting room, afraid that his own mutation might come out through his son. He has no idea that his father had been using Carol, who had actually consented through her own fear of defect (due to an earlier miscarriage before she met Craig, her uterus is no longer normal), to perfect his radiation treatments.


Long story short, Carol dies giving birth, and Jon kidnaps Craig’s son and tells Craig that the child also died. However, Craig finds out the truth and comes after his father . . . only to be too late. The child has been whisked away (we later find out to Canada), and in order to throw Craig off the trail, Jon frames him for murder. This also works in Jon’s favor, because the doctor he had murdered is the only other person who knows that the child did not die.


Which brings us to Jon’s instrument of destruction: Weeper. He is truly a fucked-in-the-head villain, as fucked in the head as they come. When we find out about his past, it’s no wonder. During the late ‘Forties, he was captured by Chairman Mao’s goons, and he was tortured for several months. Starved. Beaten. Raped. Repeatedly. “When is a man a woman?” the torturer asks. As he pulls his pants down and gets ready to rape Weeper for the first time, he shouts, “Any time I want!” After months of this, he is driven insane. When American soldiers rescue him, he looks like a concentration camp survivor, and he thinks in terms of song lyrics. By the time we meet him, his favorites are songs by the Doors and “I Am the Walrus” by the Beatles. He decides he is the Lizard King, that he can do anything. The man is absolutely vile and heartless, shockingly so for the period in which he was written.


Craig runs from Gate, and after many years of trials and tribulations, he falls in with a circus and starts making money off of his deformity in the sideshow. Soon, his closest friends are freaks, in particular a dog boy by the name of Growler. After a while, he even starts believing his father’s story about the death of his son.


However, in his absence, something very pivotal happens to Jon Stonewall: he is told that he has cancer. Malignant. He doesn’t have long to live. After years of experimenting with radiation, the disease has finally caught up with him. So, he comes up with a brilliant plan, very Machiavellian, and with the help of Weeper and several government connections, he sets it in motion.


It all begins when Craig sees the cover of TIME with Jon on it . . . and Craig’s son?! In the article, Jon claims to have genetically engineered the child to be perfect in every way. He’s finally achieved his lifetime goal.


Well, sort of. Nothing is what it seems, not even Jon’s plan. You see, he has a back up plan, and it’s pretty fucking grim. It leads to one of the most heartbreaking endings in comic book history. It hurts almost as much as the ending of EX MACHINA.


That’s a lot of territory to cover, and there’s a lot more I haven’t told you about. My favorite part is a speech Jon gives concerning his own childhood in issue 6. He tells a story of the good ol’ days, of happiness and cheer, of loving parents, and all of that. As he says these things, the artwork of Rob Davis shows us the reality, of how Jon constantly got his ass kicked by bullies, and how his ostracized father (a self-confessed Communist) brought his entire family down, which caused Jon’s mother to abandon them. It’s an ugly little story, and it explains a lot about how Jon became the man he is.


Jon Stonewall is, in fact, the most interesting character in the book. He has lofty, noble goals. When you get right down to it, he wants to save the human race from its own faulty genetic code. You can’t get nobler than that. But he is so underhanded and evil in his methods that one can’t help but think of him as a villain. This kind of complexity just wasn’t in comic books back then. Well, nothing mainstream, anyway. And like I said, Alan Moore was just starting to change readers’ minds with his own work at the time.


If there was any justice in the world, this book would be remembered as a major turning point in comic book history. It would have been canonized and filmed and everything. Writers like Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis would list it as a huge influence on their own work. Vertigo would have found a way to reprint it in a trade. As it is, I am the only person I know who remembers this book.


Good luck finding it. I bought the last copies from Mile High (unless they’ve restocked, somehow). I don’t even know if you could find it at C2E2. If you do manage to find it, I guarantee that the hunt is worth it.

COOL SHIT 9-29-11

AMERICAN VAMPIRE #19: So . . . Skinner Sweet and Jim Book, mortal enemies, were childhood friends? And Book’s family adopted Skinner when his parents died, making them brothers? Very interesting. We finally get a look at Sweet before he was turned into a vampire. It turns out that even as a child, he was an evil little bastard. I desperately hope that what happened at the end of #18 wasn’t the end of him. Without him, I don’t know if I want to go on reading this book.

THE LAST ZOMBIE: INFERNO #3: So far, this book has just been good enough. For those who don’t know, the zombie apocalypse is over, and we won. It’s just that the world has been thrown into chaos, and a group of soldiers is making their way across the wasteland that remains. Dr. Ian Scott wants nothing more than to see his wife again, but somehow he’s become infected and is turning into a zombie. He keeps this a secret from the others because he wants to make it to his woman before he dies. The real star, however, and the character who made me want to add this book to Cool Shit this week, is Planters, one of the soldiers, who is haunted by what happened to his family during the zombie apocalypse. We finally get his story, and holy shit, is it a nasty one. If you only know writer Brian Keene from his novels, you should try out this book.

KICK-ASS 2 #4: Yes, ladies and gentlemen, what you see above is Red Mist gunning down several children, and that’s not even the worst thing he does in this issue. All right, he’s calling himself Motherfucker these days, but it’s still everyone’s favorite twat, Red Mist. Even his fellow supervillains think this is fucked up. His response: “Oh, come on. So iCarly loses a few viewers? Give me a fucking break.” He then proceeds to rape Kick-Ass’ love interest. That’s right, he rapes her. Think about the horrifying implications of this. When the Joker crippled Barbara Gordon, did he rape her? No, he merely shot her in the spine. When was the last time you heard of the Green Goblin forcing himself on Gwen Stacy? Right. Writer Mark Millar has upped the ante with this issue. It’s almost like he’s taken Alan Moore’s place. Remember when Moore published the second LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN? And he had Mr. Hyde rape the Invisible Man to death? It was almost as if Moore had seen the movie made of the first and was daring Hollywood to put that scene to film. That’s the same kind of feeling I’m getting from Millar on this one. I’d tell you to go out and buy this book, but considering its enormous popularity, you probably already have.

COOL SHIT 9-30-10

Jesus. Another crap week here at Cool Shit. Once again, there is only one book who made the cut, and sad to say, it was just barely. Maybe I’m depressed with the news that DC might be shutting down Vertigo by December. I don’t know. But, here we go with the one good book of the week:



CROSSED: FAMILY VALUES #4: Yeah, I miss Garth Ennis on this series. The new writer, David Lapham, is really good with most things (crime, obviously), but pseudo-zombie apocalypses? Not so much. Ennis can take humanity and make it real, but Lapham sometimes makes it sound too hokey. Still, they share the ability to be extreme. As per usual, the kinda-sorta zombies are ultra-violent, and their words are really ugly, but Lapham falls into the trap so many writers these days are familiar with: the real monsters of this book are the people. Yes, the villains here are ordinary people with guns who want to steal horses from our heroes. Things get nasty, and the main bad guy (a fella’ who looks a bit too much like Alan Moore) sounds exactly like one of the Crossed, especially when he says things like, “I’ll fuck that little girl’s brains through her teeth while the rest of ‘em [pregnant women] bleed out!” It’s a good read (not great), and the art, while sometimes silly, is good enough (I miss Jacen Burrows, too), but ultimately worth the price of admission.