Review Category: Comic Books

Fanzines have of course been around since fandom began and are a mainstay of our genre culture. Some are good, some are inevitably not. The quality of writing and presentation in them varies dramatically.

 

However, there is one such publication that is absolutely outstanding in both writing and presentation. Catering to Doctor Who fans, the magazine is titled Vworp Vworp! and is now in its third issue.

 

Published on an irregular schedule – this issue was five years in the making, Vworp Vworp! is a huge slab of a magazine, 200 densely packed pages on high grade paper (we’ll resist the temptation to pun that it’s larger on the inside to accommodate the content) – which costs a hefty £10. But don’t let the cover price fool you. It’s actually worth every single penny and takes a long time to even browse through, much less read from cover to cover. For that, set aside an entire weekend – you’ll need it.

 

The issue contains a twenty six page article on Alan Moore, containing four separate interviews with the comic book writing legend, covering every aspect of his career, with a revealing glimpse of a Doctor Who story he would like to write.

 

The bulk of the issue though is devoted to The Daleks. Not, as one might expect, yet another dreary rundown of the greatest Dalek stories shown on TV – but a fascinating in-depth history of their history in comics, from those much-loved strips on the back page of TV21 in the sixties to later incarnations in the Doctor Who Magazine. Artist and writer profiles and interviews here give a rare insight into how The Daleks had a full and rich history outside their run-ins with a renegade time lord. As the TV21 strip ended with the Daleks discovering Earth and plotting their invasion, among the reprinted strips here are a follow-up, post the invasion.

 

Many of us who are of a certain age will certainly wallow in the nostalgia as the Dalek annuals produced in the mid sixties at the height of Dalekmania are also covered, along with other items of early Dalek memorabilia. The Dalek coverage concludes with an extensive look at the Abslom Daak: Dalek Killer strip.

 

An added bonus is a free cover mounted CD, which contains an adaptation of one of the comic strips from The Dalek World (1966) in a Big Finish style dramatisation featuring the voice of David Graham as the Dalek Emperor.

 

With an ongoing series of profiles of the Doctor Who Magazine editors and a look at the Target series of novelisations from the seventies included  – this is a well written and superbly packaged Doctor Who extravaganza.

 

VWORP VWORP! VOLUME 3 / WRITERS & ARTISTS: VARIOUS / PUBLISHER: VWORP VWORP! / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW 

The legend of Sir Bevis of Hampton is a story from British medieval mythology which has somehow fallen through the cracks. Once popularised all over Europe, this colourful, vivid story of one young man’s journey into adulthood and his burning desire for vengeance has somehow been forgotten – possibly because it takes its hero away from English shores – where the stories of the likes of King Arthur and Camelot and Robin Hood and his band of outlaws have thrived and prospered as very domestic home-grown legends. This new stark, blood-drenched publication seeks to redress the balance by resurrecting Sir Bevis and his colourful adventures for a new audience in a project which is part of the Eastleigh Borough Council ‘Digital Arts Programme Eastleigh (DAPE)’, a Tec Hub project that aims to support new talent and emerging businesses working with digital arts to explore inspirational and exciting new ways to present work.

 

Blood and Valour is a collected ‘graphic novel’ publication (often extremely graphic) containing an introductory four-part story – each section is effectively its own individual comic book with a splash page representing its own cover – which tells of the ten year-old Bevis whose father Sir Guy, the Earl of Hampton, is murdered in a plot hatched by his duplicitous mother, the King of Scotland’s daughter, and her lover Lord Conrad, brother to the Emperor of Germany. His home and his heritage lost, Bevis swears vengeance for his murdered father and, his own life at risk, is forced to flee into exile where he must bide his time, learning the skills he will need before he can return home and regain what it is his by right.

 

Created using a combination of traditional – if sometimes pleasantly rudimentary – artwork and clever digital imagery utilising real-life performers to bring key characters to life on the page, Blood and Valour is a fascinating, immersive experience and a refreshingly-different way of delivering a story in comic strip form. At this early stage – further volumes are promised chronicling Bevis’s continuing exploits – the story itself is fairly undemanding but the illustrations are often striking in their simplicity, cutting to the chase in telling the story cleanly and evocatively and the script is brittle, punchy and to the point. There’s a real sense of dirt-beneath-the-fingernails in the book’s depiction of a harsh, brutal medieval England where violence and lawlessness are rife and the threat of beheading and bludgeoning are daily facts of life.

 

Blood and Valour may be a little rough and ready around the edges for some tastes and the digital photography colour pages can be a little disorientating and risk tearing the reader out of the belly of the story, but this is a bold, exciting and ambitious new project which leaves us looking forward to future volumes and the further adventures of Bevis which promise “monstrous men and menacing monsters, giants and dragons, distant lands, nobles and treacherous Kings.” Or just another day at the office, as we call it here at Starburst HQ.

 

Find out more about the Blood and Valour series here

BLOOD AND VALOUR / PUBLISHER: EASTLEIGH BOROUGH COUNCIL / WRITER: MATT BEAMES / ARTIST: MARCUS PULLEN / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Billed as ‘A Doctor Who Comics Event’, Supremacy of the Cybermen, a five-issue mini-series from Titan, now released as a 130-page collected trade edition, is actually something of a non-event. Despite all its Universe-threatening bombast, its spectacle, its unashamed fan services, it’s really just a rehash of Doctor Who elements Titan have been playing with since they nabbed the comic strip rights to the series a few years ago. So we get a clumsy amalgam of all post-2005 Doctors (although at least they don’t cross timelines here), brief flashbacks to the ‘classic series’ Doctors, a couple of TV companions (Rose Tyler, her mum, Captain Jack), Titan’s own anonymous and interchangeable companions for the tenth and eleventh Doctors (who add virtually nothing to the narrative), yet another plot by the Cybermen to conquer all creation and cameo appearances by the Sontarans and the ‘new series’ Silurians. Throw in some shenanigans on the rediscovered Gallifrey, the return of Rassilon (banished from his home world by the Doctor at the end of series nine on the telly) and the sort of comic book spectacle way beyond the means of the TV show’s budget and we’re delivered a rather sluggish and unimaginative stew almost entirely created out of warmed-up leftovers from the TV series and with precious evidence of the real sense of invention Doctor Who is capable of at is best.

The twelfth Doctor (although you’d be hard-pressed to tell from the often woeful depiction of the striking Peter Capaldi) returns to the storm swept planet Karn (fangasm number one) which leads him back to Gallifrey which he discovers, to his horror, has been taken over by the Cybermen, who have been led there by the exiled Rassilon. But Cybertechnology has been upgraded and the Cybermen are now swarming across all space and time, annihilating everything in their path as they prepare for their final triumph on Gallifrey, harnessing the Time Lord power of regeneration to complete their domination of the universe. No small stakes here.

If you like your Doctor Who impossibly epic and laced with arcane continuity alongside great dollops of the glib humour which characterises the show on TV these days, you’re likely to find much to enjoy in Supremacy of the Cybermen. But there’s really very little new here in a story which is happy to play with well-established series lore and characters without bringing anything original to them beyond the ability to tell a story on a more spectacular canvas than the TV series. As a self-congratulatory exercise in giving the hardcore fans what they think they want, it probably passes muster and yet despite all its gung-ho action sequences and its slavish adherence to the now-stifling body of continuity dragged back into the TV series, it feels lumpy and uninvolving and magnificently fails to capture the very special essence of Doctor Who at its best. There’s not even much fun to be had in seeing the Eccleston/Tennant/Smith/Capaldi Doctors in comic book form as they rarely look anything like their TV counterparts save in the odd panel; Tennant and Smith in particular look like generic square-jawed comic strip heroes and Capaldi is generally just a random collection of facial features with a smudge of grey hair.

Titan has done better work across their other numerous series chronicling ‘unseen’ adventures of both new and old TV Doctors which at least afford the opportunity for new stories, new worlds and new characters. Supremacy of the Cybermen and IDW’s tedious 2012 Star Trek: Next Generation crossover seem to suggest that in comic book form, as on television, Doctor Who is at its strongest when it’s allowing its imaginative potential full reign rather than anchoring itself far too closely to its hopelessly-convoluted history.

DOCTOR WHO – SUPREMACY OF THE CYBERMEN / PUBLISHER: TITAN / WRITERS: CAVAN SCOTT, GEORGE MANN / ARTISTS: IVAN RODRIGUEZ, WALTER GEOVANNI / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Julia Davenport has a problem in her sex life – whenever she orgasms, she releases a mysterious demonic entity with an unfortunate predilection for killing anyone in the vicinity. They didn’t cover that in sex ed lessons. In the first issue of Off Girl, independently published by its writer Tina Fine, we join Julia as she tries to avoid getting it on with anyone and learns more about her strange curse.

 

Though the concept may invite comparisons with the acclaimed series Sex Criminals – comparisons which it would be difficult to come out of favourably – it’s an interesting twist on the concept, with Julia’s superpower being more of a burden than a benefit. Fine uses this to explore the idea of a female character struggling with an overpowering need for sex, something that would stereotypically be more of a problem for men.

 

This, however, does factor in to one of the problems with this first issue. The story’s blurb proclaims that Julia has been faking her orgasms to avoid killing anyone, but the comic itself contradicts this, presenting us instead with a character who can’t seem to avoid accidentally getting laid (we wish we had this problem) and at one point orgasms after barely any sexual contact. Because it’s not made clear (or even acknowledged) why she’s so damn horny all the time, some of the decisions Julia makes make her difficult to like as a lead character.

 

This isn’t helped by the fact that the story starts with Julia already knowing about her power, which does add pacing but also leaves us confused at points, nor by the rushed manner in which a lot of the scenes are written, with dialogue being very to the point.

 

What does make the comic stand out, however, is Mark Reihill’s distinctive art style, which looks something like the cel-shaded style of A Scanner Darkly crossed with a modern noir. Moody and evocative, Reihill’s art forgoes detail in favour of striking character designs and strong chiaroscuro, a style which particularly fits one expressionistic sequence at the – ahem – climax of the issue.

 

Though the way her powers and story are handled is somewhat confused, Off Girl has an interesting enough lead character and an impressive enough look to it that we’re curious to see how it develops. The scenes that set up a serial killer villain are intriguing, and we’d love to get to know more of Julia’s backstory, so maybe after a few more issues, Off Girl will reach its peak.

 

OFF GIRL #1 / AUTHOR: TINA FINE / ARTIST: MARK REIHILL / PUBLISHER: PROJECT CLIMAX / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Melanie is a shy, insecure and put-upon teenager who would most likely have remained that way were it not for a chance encounter with a dying warrior. To keep it out of the hands of evil she is fostered with the Wraithborn, a supernatural power guarded by an ancient and secretive brotherhood to battle demonic immortals. Only problem is, anyone who possesses the power immediately becomes a target for those who desire it.

 

As concepts go Wraithborn’s is not exactly groundbreaking, but the plot is interesting enough for what it is. Acting as an origin story, it sees Melanie’s everyday life of teenage obscurity become gatecrashed by a world of supernatural terror that she barely has a moment to get her head around. Surrounded by people who want to use her or kill her and with some characters’ allegiances constantly shifting, trust is difficult for her to come by. Despite how good the intentions of those who defend her might be, everyone she encounters is ultimately driven by their own selfish desire for power, each somewhat arrogantly believing that they alone possess the wisdom to properly wield it.

 

Deftly mixing urban fantasy and horror, each hell-beast sent after Melanie is more hideous than the last, reanimation and dark magic warping them into slavering creatures of contorted limbs, swollen muscles, glowing eyes, piercing claws and razor teeth. The fights are fast, intense and brutal, the modern age and ancient magic viscerally clashing as blood and body parts soak the grey stone of the uncomprehending city.

 

The comic has been frequently compared to Witchblade, and with both the premise of an inherited mantle used to fight supernatural evil and luscious artwork featuring beautiful busty women in tight and revealing outfits it’s not an entirely unfair comparison. It also shares more than a little DNA with Buffy, having an ordinary teenager becoming the latest in a line of Chosen Ones without being given any say in the matter, thereby assuming the responsibility of battling the forces of darkness.

 

Volume one of Wraithborn is only an introduction to its world, offering a mere glimpse at its background mythology. Despite its familiar setup it leaves you hungry to learn about what other monstrosities lurk in the shadows, and see the development of its nascent heroine into the dark and hardened warrior it promises she will become.

 

WRAITHBORN VOLUME 1 / AUTHOR: MARIA CHEN, JOE BENITEZ / ARTIST: JOE BENITEZ, JOE WEEMS, VICTOR LLAMAS, MIKE GARCIA / PUBLISHER: BENITEZ PRODUCTIONS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

Since its inception, the superhero genre has explored the role of the outsider, the complex social standing of masked heroes at once adored and demonised. With My So-called Secret Identity, pop culture cognoscente Will Brooker takes this idea to its logical conclusion, exploring the role of women both in our own social strata and in mainstream comics themselves.

 

Having suffered sexual assault at the hands of former hero Carnival, Catharine Abigail Daniels (or Cat) is trying to find some normacy in a world of little sense. She goes about her day-to-day routine, each activity accomplished a little victory. Remember Alan Moore’s controversial Killing Joke, with its infamous shooting and sexual assault of Barbara Gordon? It took another 23 years for Babs to make sense of her trauma. Here we have Cat’s psyche picked apart and explored, as she moves through the extremes of emotion, from anger to feeling nothing at all, then finally an empowering return to form.

 

Early in the volume, Cat covers her scars with make-up, a kind of new mask trying to bury what she’d endured. Her abuse calls back to the Comedian’s behaviour in Moore’s Watchmen, in which he tried to rape Silk Spectre. The entire concept here is in dialogue with Moore’s apparent fascination with sexual abuse and degradation, and striving for a new paradigm.

 

There’s shades of Barbara Gordon’s Batgirl in Cat; her struggle with the nature of justice and vigilantism, and a young woman’s role in the modern world. Yet the character is informed as much by real world events as what’s on the page. The backlash fans expressed when a new creative team overhauled Babs’ costume – a similar story with Spider Woman – makes Cat’s discomfort in her earlier bare-all outfits more potent.

 

Though the story takes place in an alternative timeline, where defining historical events unfurled at different times or in another context, everything’s familiar. Some of the players riff on existing characters, from Poison Ivy and the Riddler to a great skewering of Batman. Underneath the homage is an indictment of the industry, especially the erasure of older women, where constant retconning and reboots leave Wonder Woman et al. perpetually nubile. Rather than being forced into the carer role, Golden Age hero Liberty Bell comes out of retirement when things go sour, and that’s a powerful statement.

 

The final chapter is the volume at its most experimental, playing with the structure and conventions of sequential art, and glimpsing a story between and behind the panels. It might be obvious to call it a deconstruction, but that’s exactly what’s taking place with Cat photographed as a real woman, while another panel sees her in colour, then line art disappearing into a pencil sketch on a white background. And then she takes control again, in a medium where female characters are sidelined and subservient to the whims of male artists.

 

The five chapters are told through a number of different artists, while the additional stories and guest art in the back matter show that comics are diverse and inclusive. Isn’t that what My So-called Secret Identity is fighting for all along?

 

MY SO-CALLED SECRET IDENTITY VOL. 2 / AUTHOR: WILL BROOKER / COVER ART: URSULA DORADA / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW 

First poor Chris gets laid off work then he comes home to discover his dad, David, borrowed money from a loan shark to keep up with medical bills. Things are looking bleak for Chris Mclean, which leads him to desperate measures. Enticed by his friends, Mark and Sophie, who come up with an elaborate plan to steal rare and valuable comic books from their local comic con. Surely fighting crime with crime isn’t the answer?

 

The Big Comic Con is a simple yet effective story that meshes reality with the world of comics and a hard ass mob boss. Possibly the first comic to be set in Dunfermline, filled with local references and illustrated landmarks such as The Little Shop of Heroes and the Dunfermline Comic Con itself. Maxwell and Philp definitely embraced this and made the most of it. In fact it almost feels like an advertisement to be a volunteer at the Con, as the main protagonist Chris keeps saying he is going, though curiously we never actually end up seeing him there.

 

As for the art, Michael Philp has done a great job keeping the layout smooth and allowing each panel to flow, though the art is a little choppy there is still enough motion to capture the excitement and energy and it looks like he had a lot of fun with it, which rubs off on the story. Writer and colourist Colin Maxwell has done well in bringing a lot of bold and lively colour into it as well as toning it down for more serious scenes.

 

The Big Comic Con is an easy and fun journey to follow, with lively and colourful characters. The relationship between Chris and his Dad is wholesome and Maxwell never needed to delve deep into there backgrounds to give them depth and make them likeable. Though it would have been interesting to see a little more grit and peril, it is still a great little read for all.

 

THE BIG COMIC CON / WRITER & COLOURIST & LETTERER: COLIN MAXWELL / ARTISTS: MICHAEL PHILP / PUBLISHER: MAXIMIZED COMICS / RELEASE DATE: 11TH MARCH

In Royal Descent, the fifty members of the extended royal family closest in line to the British throne have been transported to an uninhabited Hebridean island to fight to the death, the blue-blooded butchery screened as the reality TV contest Battle For the Crown, with the prize of becoming the country’s next monarch.

 

The series so far has hardly let up for a moment and this latest issue is no exception, with barely a couple of pages going by without another gory and agonised killing. The arrogance you would expect of those who populate society’s highest echelon is now in full display in many characters, but far more important (and interesting) is how utterly ruthless some of them are revealing themselves to be.

 

Mixing up the brutal violence are cutaways to TV presenters commenting on the carnage with the detached enthusiasm of sports analysts, giving events the overall feel of a particularly vicious episode of Black Mirror. They make further references to the ravaged country at large, incidental to current proceedings but offering a glimpse at the state of the dystopian hellhole the country has descended into, while also tacitly suggesting that the Battle’s very existence is intended to distract the public from the realities of the doomed nation in which they reside.

 

Two new additions to the Battle, lottery-winning ordinary members of the public, make known the full force of their seething contempt for the royals. Their contribution is brief, but their assimilation into the combat is swift and uncompromising, even invoking Judge Dredd in the process. It’s also rather telling that in a story where almost every character is an entitled noble born into wealth and influence via a society clinging to a vestigial stump of feudalism, they’re the only ones so far who aren’t white.

 

With such an expansive cast, all of whom need to be featured at some point if only to be swiftly killed, things could easily become cluttered. However, the various character threads are deftly wrangled (aided by the mounting body count), progressing each just enough to move things along, but not so much that other plotlines suffer. The kill methods maintain their streak of inventive variation (this time: cling film!) and several of the more recognisable characters have begun to get unceremoniously offed, with one death in particular being a darkly comic highlight that may well give you a vicarious sense of satisfaction.

 

The best issue yet of an already compelling series, Royal Descent #4 is action, satire, social commentary and black comedy colliding in a mesmerising barrage of blood-spattered brutality. Things are about to get very, very intense.

 

ROYAL DESCENT #4 / AUTHOR: JOHN FARMAN / ARTIST: JOHN HOWARD / PUBLISHER: VITAL PUBLISHING / RELEASE DATE: 1ST MARCH

 

Since its main series came to an end, Batman 66, the comic book tribute to the much-loved Adam West TV series, has lived on in six-issue collections where the Dynamic Duo have paired up with other ‘60s icons, including the Green Hornet and Kato, the Man from U.N.C.L.E and The Avengers (John Steed and Emma Peel). This time around they are paired up with another DC legend: Wonder Woman, but not just any Wonder Woman, the classic Lynda Carter TV incarnation of the 1970s, who has also enjoyed her own main series Wonder Woman 77. Starburst went to find out whether this really was a pairing made in Holy matrimony! (Yes! Every pun intended!)

 

After apprehending Catwoman, the Caped Crusader reminisces with the Boy Wonder over the time he met “one of the greatest heroes the world has ever known”, however, not as a man, but as a young man in the company of his parents at a Wayne Foundation function in aid of the war effort. Bruce is introduced to a very young Talia Al Ghul, but she is not alone, her father, Ra’s Al Ghul, is keen to bid for two volumes of Lost World of the Ancients in the charity auction. The party is then ambushed by Nazis with equal interest in the books. However, an attending army officer named Diana Prince has other ideas, spinning into action as Wonder Woman. Bruce is able to escape with and hide the books, just as Ra’s Al Ghul has him cornered with a sword…

 

Batman 66 Meets Wonder Woman 77 is a good old fashioned yarn and has the potential to be a first rate story. The inclusion of Ra’s Al Ghul was a bit of a gamble, given that the character never existed when the 60s TV show first began, but this incarnation is certainly channelling his inner Yul Brynner to be menacing in a manner that fits the series. It will be exciting to see how the meeting of these much loved incarnations pans out.

 

BATMAN 66 MEETS WONDER WOMAN 77 / WRITERS: MARC ANDREYKO, JEFF PARKER / ARTISTS: KARL KESEL, DAVID HAHN / PUBLISHER: DC COMICS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW