// Category Archive for: Comics

Comics Review: Saga

By E.A. Henson

With these review pieces I normally try and tackle something new and worthy of your attention. For this piece in particular I’ll be taking a look at something that’s not terribly new but still is something of note, Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples.
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Comic Review: Jeff Lemire’s Royal City

By E.A. Henson

Reading comics is just like consuming any other kind of media for me. You consume what you’re presented with on a weekly basis and there’s a certain baseline enjoyment you derive from it. Spider-Man duking it out with Doc Ock again? Cool. Batman solving a crime while being dark and brooding about it? Right on.

For comic book fans that’s pretty much it. I’m not saying that it’s boring or it’s really even that bad. I’m sure I’ve written before that comics are (for me and I’m sure others) escapism. That’s great, but it can also get stale pretty quickly.

When something truly good comes along it’s easy to notice but you also have to be paying attention. I know how easy it is to get your weekly pull from your LCS (Local Comic Shop), plow through your books, and finish them in time for Arrow to start on Wednesday night. I do it all the time and it’s super easy (is that a super hero pun? I can’t tell anymore).
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“Cannibal” Is 100 Proof Southern Noir Goodness

By Tim Murr

Set in the swampy Florida Gulf Coast, Cannibal is about a virus that causes the infected to crave flesh. Wait! It’s not another zombie story! Stay with me.

We’ve all got zombie fatigue, but Cannibal is different. Writers Brian Buccellatto and Jennifer Young and artist Matias Bergara craft a fantastic tale where character comes first. There’s also a solid mystery story built on the bedrock of great horror. Volume one collects the first four issues of this Southern Gothic noir and for me it’s a home run.
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Riverdale: Stupid, Sexy Archie

By E.A. Henson

I am a fan of Archie Comics.

Now, I had never actually purchased an Archie comic up until 2015… but I’m still a fan.
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Tim Murr: Best Of 2016

By Tim Murr

Lucio Fulci’s Zombie comic from Eibon Press
Stephen Romano and company have made a huge splash with their first series, an adaptation/on-going series based on the Lucio Fulci classic Zombie, the infamously gory 1979 Italian flick that served as an unofficial sequel to George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead. The comic features fantastic art in glorious color and comes packed in sturdy slipcases. Only available through the Eibon Press website, this series is a great way to create niche collectible comics. With adaptations of Gates Of Hell and Maniac and the original series Bottomfeeders coming soon, it looks like Eibon Press will be the publisher to beat in 2017. (Read more.)

Dark Palms, Hoxbar Ghost Town
The debut album from the Pacific Northwest band took goth and post-punk and created a highly entertaining, propulsive slab of rock and roll. (Read my full review.)

Phantasm RaVager directed by Don Coscarelli
The fifth and final film in the Phantasm franchise arrived in October and was a worthy farewell to a group of characters who phans have loyally followed since 1979. There has been some knee-jerk negativity directed at the film, but I found that on repeated viewings the movie gets better (but I liked it right away!).

High-Rise directed by Ben Wheatley
Starring Tom Hiddleston, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, Jeremy Irons, and Elisabeth Moss, High-Rise is a dizzyingly moving adaptation of the JG Ballard novel from 1975. Set in a fictional mixed-use high-rise building, it’s a microcosm of class struggle in an alternate historical 1970s Britain. Brilliantly cast, beautifully shot, and fairly fucked up, High-Rise is one of the few book-to-film adaptations that lives up to its source.

Sherlock Holmes And The Servants Of Hell by Paul Kane
Paul Kane is the world’s leading expert on Hellraiser and powerhouse of a writer. In this book, Kane does a pitch-perfect Conan Doyle as he mixes the world of Sherlock Holmes with the world of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, pitting the world’s greatest detective (not named Batman) against The Order Of The Gash. It is a very cool book and it’s a lot of fun to see Holmes and Watson going up against Cenobites and… an “old friend.”

Laury Scarbro: Top Five Movies Of 2016

By Laury Scarbro

Star Trek Beyond

First and foremost, it has to be said that there are many movies that were released this year that I have not yet had the privilege to see. Several of those have yet to be released in theaters, or haven’t made it to DVD yet, so I’ll save that for another post. That being said, let’s get on with the list. This is also not the easiest list to put in any kind of order, so I’m not going to number them.
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Comic Reviews: Loving The Animal, Part 2

By E.A. Henson

There are no great second acts.

Unless you count The Empire Strikes Back, The Wrath of Khan, Paul’s Boutique, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, etc. Whoever it was that mangled that F. Scott Fitzgerald quote clearly never took those into consideration. I’m fairly confident that if Fitzgerald had read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets he would have thrown the manuscript for The Great Gatsby right in the trash.
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Comics Review: Loving The Animal, Part 1

By E.A. Henson

Books: Doom Patrol and Shade, The Changing Girl

The first time I heard about DC Comic’s Young Animal imprint I was nearly drowned in the sea of buzzwords that accompanied it: pop-up, curated, boutique. Admittedly, it took me a moment to get past all that to see what the books really are.

For me, the press releases should’ve read “BREAKING: COMICS FAN MAKES GOOD, COMES BACK TO OLD NEIGHBORHOOD A HERO.” But I’m getting ahead of myself.
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Can I Get A Witness? Absolute Preacher Is A Triumph

By E.A. Henson

The first season of the darkly funny and hyper-violent Preacher TV series recently wrapped up and DC/Vertigo Comics has, coincidentally, just published the first volume of Absolute Preacher. If you’re a new fan of the show or an old fan of the comic this hefty tome is definitely something worthy of your attention.
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Movie Review: Suicide Squad

By Tim Murr

The premise is simple and we’ve seen it before, most notably in the film The Dirty Dozen: take a handful of bad guys, throw them together for a suicide mission, and voila, instant action film. In the case of Suicide Squad, the mission is to get inside Midway City and extract an important someone who is trapped downtown during some kind of terror attack. Of course, the threat is much larger and weirder than anyone would admit to, so this loose cadre of crazy criminals has to learn to be team players on the fly in order to complete the mission… and if they don’t, well, the man in charge, Rick Flagg will just blow their heads off with the push of a button.

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