COOL SHIT 1-16-14

GRAVEL: COMBAT MAGICIAN #0: FUCK YES! The return of William Gravel! I’ve been a fan of this book since I stumbled upon the first issue of STRANGE KISS at the Graham Crackers in Wheaton. Hot off the fucking press. I only wish that Warren Ellis was still writing it. Don’t get me wrong, I like Mike Wolfer, but Ellis brought a harder edge (and a darker humor) to Gravel. In this one, Gravel expounds on the history of combat magic in Britain, and of course he has to go up against a French combat magician. This is a bit of an odd #0, though. Usually, when Avatar Press does a #0, it’s a smaller book, maybe 99-cents, with a black and white preview, or maybe the first five pages of the first issue with a bunch of artist sketches. This one is fucking massive and comes in at $4.99 with a story of its own, which looks a lot to me like an issue one. There is a great combat log in the back of the book, giving readers Gravel’s history, starting with STRANGE KISS and going through to the final issue of GRAVEL. (Although the order is kind of off, and I can’t figure out why.)

CRYPTOZOIC MAN #3: This is an odd book for me. I can read any comic book with shitty art, just so long as the story is good. I’ve been fond of saying the opposite is not true. No matter how good the art, if the story sucks, I can’t get through it. I’m not saying the story of this book sucks. I just can’t get into it. However, the art is so mindblowingly amazing, I can’t ignore this book. There are so many great images, I found it really hard to settle on the one I wanted to sample for Cool Shit. I think I made the right choice, though.

GOD IS DEAD #5: OK, the gods are still kicking the shit out of each other. That’s not the cool part about this book. You know how the geniuses are trying to create gods of their own to fight the real gods? Well . . . they succeeded with this issue, and not in a good way. That last panel will make you clench your asshole.

NEXT TESTAMENT #7: This is probably my favorite miniseries going on right now, and Clive Barker and Mark Miller have upped the ante big time with this issue. God demands that his new followers fucking BUILD HIM A PYRAMID. When they fuck it up, he gets rid of them all. Next on the agenda? Blacking out the sun and raising a plague of locusts. And he’s acting like he just did everyone a favor. It’s unreal how good this book is.

COOL SHIT 1-17-13

G.I. JOE #21:  In today’s issue of G.I. JOE, the role of Hawk will be played by Bruce Willis.  Seriously, this one could have been an ‘Eighties action movie.  Hawk has retired and is living out in the woods when he is suddenly beset by the forces of Cobra, intent on kidnapping him and extracting intelligence from him.  They don’t count on him remembering his training, and they certainly didn’t expect him to be living with Timber, Snake-Eyes’s wolf.  One man against a team of terrorists?  Yeah, that’s some John McClane shit right there.  Oh yeah, and apparently Cobra has iPads with the Cobra insignia on it instead of the usual Apple.  That definitely makes sense.  The only problem is, the cover shows Flint, not Hawk.  Or maybe it’s the movie version of Hawk as portrayed by Dennis Quaid, but that makes no sense, as the worlds aren’t connected.  Am I nitpicking here?  Yeah.  Fuck it.  On to the next one . . . .

STITCHED #11:  Let’s face it, when Garth Ennis stopped writing this book and Mike Wolfer took over, things haven’t been going so well.  Not that Wolfer is a bad writer (although he is a much better artist than he is a writer), but he just didn’t have the same quality as Ennis did.  However, in this issue, we finally find out what caused the Stitched to exist, and it’s a pretty interesting tale.  Hint:  ancient, black devil cum is responsible in some way.  That’s definitely something Ennis would have done.  Hats off, Mr. Wolfer.

CROSSED:  BADLANDS #21:  Speaking of books Ennis used to write . . . .  Unlike Wolfer, David Lapham is an intense motherfucker and constantly tries to one-up Ennis.  Sometimes he succeeds.  This is one of those instances.  Remember Amanda from the “Psychopath” storyline?  The one with Lorre?  Well, she’s back, and it seems that her encounter with Lorre messed her the fuck up.  She’s batshit crazy now, seeing Lorre in every stranger she meets.  And yes, she’s willing to kill all of the suspected Lorres in the world.  Now she might have gone completely off the deep end, though, especially now that Danger Montana is in her life.  He looks suspiciously of a guy who is very familiar with lost arks, temples of doom, last crusades, and crystal skulls.  In fact, he claims that those movies are based on his life.  Even stranger than that is the company he keeps.  In my opinion, there’s no way that this is actually happening.  Amanda is probably already dead, and this is a goofy afterlife or something.  Then again, Lapham is a rabid beast.  He could do anything, so I’m definitely along on this ride.

AND NOW FOR A SPECIAL EDITION OF . . .

SHIT SHIT

Remember a while ago when I brought you news of IDW’s newest bullshit crossover?  And you all called me crazy, that it had to be a hoax, that no one would ever go ahead with such an awful idea?  Behold!  IDW has revealed the proof!  This month will be consumed by their MARS ATTACKS crossover!  Now, MARS ATTACKS is pretty cool, but the other series they’re going to cross it over with?  Uh . . . it’s so bad, it’s sickening.

Shit, I know I’m kind of late with this one.  It just slipped under my radar.  Apparently, three of these books are already out.  First up:  Popeye.  Yes, Popeye.  The guy with the giant forearms and the spinach habit.  Second up?  KISS.  Yeah, no kidding.  The aliens actually go up against fucking KISS.  This week, it was Ghostbusters, but that was just to be expected.  The one that’s going to hurt the most for me is next week’s, which involves the Transformers.  The final one is supposed to be something called Zombies vs. Robots, so I don’t really give much of a fuck.  As if this wasn’t bad enough, they have incentive covers for comic shops.  Though they’re not really actual storylines, the fact that someone thought this shit up disgusts me.  One of them features Opus, from Bloom County.  Or Outland, if you’re too young to remember that.  Or how about a Judge Dredd crossover?  Maybe you’d like to try out Chew and Madman, or how about Spike, from the Buffy universe?  Or . . . fuck it.  I can’t go on.

I told you so.  That’s all I’m trying to say.

"DON'T BE A CUNT, MATE": A review of STITCHED

Pruitt, Cooper, and Twiggy are three soldiers on an extraction mission who accidentally crash their helicopter over enemy territory. They were receiving no incoming fire. The captain just lost control, and these soldiers nearly became one of those unfortunate casualties of war caused by mishap. Pruitt, the commander, is injured, so Cooper constantly helps him get along across the desert as Twiggy, who is only a clerk, quakes the whole way, absolutely terrified of the situation she’s in.



And then the bad guys show up. No, not the Taliban, but . . . something else. They’re kind of like zombies. Could they be demons? Djinn? Who knows?


This is the idea behind STITCHED, a short film written and directed by comic book genius Garth Ennis. However, whenever he writes war stories, he usually writes the kind that are more along the lines of “boys club” tales. Here, the only man in the trio is Pruitt, who is badly injured. Cooper, who is an absolute bad ass, has the balls of the group, despite actually lacking the physical kind.


Tank Jones plays Pruitt as best as he can. He can’t stretch out into the role as a longer feature would have allowed. Kate Kugler is decent as Twiggy, who reminds one of Dante from CLERKS when she says that she’s not even supposed to be here. The true stand-out in the cast, though, is Lauren Alonzo’s Cooper. She plays the bad ass to a T, especially as she chides Twiggy into reminding her training when they face off against the monsters.


As for the villains of the piece, they’re not bad. They could be better. The guys in the white robes play as zombies pretty well until the heroes get beyond their clothes, to the stitched eyes and mouths. But the effect looks too much like plastic to be taken seriously. We don’t get enough of a good look at their leader, the guy in the black robes, so one can’t really comment.


As to the other effects, namely that of the bodies, they could have been much better. The absurdity of their deaths would have played off well in comic books, but here in a movie, it comes off as kind of silly, especially the guy who had his intestines pulled out through his mouth. However, when one of the monsters gets shot in the head, and giant pieces of its head are blown off, it makes for a good effect.


This is the problem with the bad guys, though: if they’re such evil, mutilating bastards, why didn’t they do better against the soldiers? They just sort of . . . staggered around. The worst it got was when one of them pressed its fingers into Pruitt’s leg wound.


As far as criticisms go, that’s about all that can be found wrong with the film. The writing is superb, but that goes without question. Ennis is also a capable director. The opening scene with the three soldiers struggling across the desert is beautiful, perhaps inspired by Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST.


The editing suffers a little bit, though, when it comes to transitions. When one scene moves into the next using a black out, kind of like the space a missing commercial leaves on a DVD of a TV show, it jars the viewers out of the movie. The pacing is a little bit off in the beginning, as well, but when Ennis’s other heroes show up, everything falls perfectly into place.


Other heroes? Remember how our trio is there on an extraction mission? These other heroes are the ones they’re here to extract. In a moment of absolute peril, one of them shoves an assault rifle in a bad guy’s face and says, “Don’t be a cunt, mate.” In true Garth Ennis fashion.


The sad thing is, this is only a prologue to a bigger story. STITCHED is going to be a series from Avatar by Ennis with art by Mike Wolfer. It promises to be a hell of a book. Don’t miss out on how it all began. Get STITCHED now.


STITCHED
Written and directed by Garth Ennis
Produced by Mischief Maker Studios
17 minutes
$15