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Top Five Picks…Buy These Right Now.
1. Locke & Key Omega #5 (IDW).
2. The Wake #1 (Vertigo).
3. The Crow Skinning The Wolves (IDW).
4. Jinnrise #5 (IDW).
5. Haunted Horror #5 (IDW).
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I have not departed for the World Horror Convention/Bram Stoker Weekend yet, but I am feeling the groove already. Being an old(er) man, the first thing I do is check the weather forecast to see if I need my bonnet. 90+ all weekend in New Orleans. All right then. Leave the chapeau at home. I will be on a panel at the con about horror comics, so swing by for that (or think back to it now and say to yourself, “oh yeah, the chubby guy with the goatee…”) and generally enjoy the city and the event. If you cannot come this year, think about attending next year. It is always a good time.
So this installment of NI is a preliminary New Orleans on my mind sort of affair. There will be another written in Louisiana covering the con and the stuff I saw there. Then there will be a post-con deconstruction. Mark your calendars.
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Godzilla #12 (IDW). In this paragraph I am going to Godzilla-geek-out all over you, so take whatever precautions are necessary. In New York: Godzilla, MechaGodzilla, Ghidorah, and Space Godzilla. In Hong Kong: Gigan, Rodan, and Anguirus. Very little dialogue. Very little human interaction (I am not counting MechaGodzilla as human even though it is human controlled). Just a lot of big monster smashing, soup to nuts. In the previous issue, Godzilla faced Hedorah while Battra and Titanosaurus attacked Space Godzilla. Meanwhile Kumonga gets squished by “Monster X” (who reveals itself to be Ghidorah in issue #12). Of course this all really started back in issue #8 when monsters started arriving from space. OK, actually, you might as well go back to issue #1 and begin at the beginning, at least the beginning of this iteration of the on-going Godzilla book. It is very action-oriented, and more than a little juvenile, but, especially in the past couple of numbers, the fun factor has been ratcheted up. It is hard to imagine what else a Godzilla fan would want in a Godzilla comic. If you are a fan of the movies from when you were a kid – or if you are a kid now – the current Godzilla book is for you.
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The Crow Skinning The Wolves (IDW). James O’Barr writes in his introduction to the trade paperback collection of the three-issue mini The Crow: Skinning The Wolves that it is “Jim Terry let loose.” What he means by that is O’Barr wrote the basic story idea and Terry made it his own, fleshing out the details and adding new levels of emotion and morality to the provided outline. It is still the basic Crow set-up of abused people being avenged by a supernatural creature. This time the setting is a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. The Crow angle applies, certainly, and the setting offers ample opportunity for violence and carnage. What we get in the end is that while the revenge was, what(?), unavoidable maybe, it was not satisfying. Nobody is really any better off for the vengeance, as such. Sure, if you eliminate a few of the people causing misery then future misery by those individuals is thwarted, but there will always be more aggressors and abusers. It is a lesson retold. Crow fans are sure to be satisfied with this book, as they will also be delighted with the new one, The Crow Curare, which is actually scripted by O’Barr.
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Locke & Key Omega #5 (IDW). It has been a real pleasure to read Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke & Key over the years. So much so that each new issue has an escalating note of melancholy and maybe even desperation because we readers know that the end is near. The penultimate series, Omega, ends now with issue five, and that only leaves the final show, Alpha, which starts in August. I am getting hives just thinking about it.
So here at the end of the last but one series, a bunch of high school kids are locked in the drowning cave with living shadows. The villainous Dodge wants to use the omega key to unlock the door to another world and let the demons there into ours. What to do? A hero, Tyler, needs to come to the rescue, but he’s been inadvertently shot by a police officer. Oh shit. What now? Indeed.
There are not a lot of answers here. It is a lot like the eighth episode of the fifth season of Breaking Bad. The last season of a great show broken in half. That eighth episode left you holding your sucked-in breath for a year until the second half started up again. With Locke & Key, you only have to wait until August. But, like I have been saying, that is good news and bad news.
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Seven.
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Buy These Too…
Green Lantern #20 (DC). Not only is this an oversized issue, it is your last chance to get a Green Lantern story written by Geoff Johns, at least for the foreseeable future. Robert Venditti takes over with issue #21. Not saying anything at all about Venditti, Johns is going to be a tough act to follow.
The Long Road To Hell, An American Vampire Special (Vertigo). This monstrous fifty-plus page one-shot is an unhappy, gruesome tale of vampires set in Nebraska in 1959. It reads a lot better than the regular on-going series. Lots of fangs and blood.
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Bargain Bin…
Heavy Metal annual collections are on sale, one each week, for half price at the website (http://www.heavymetal.com/). Sign up for the electronic newsletter so you can know which year is available when. Half off is good.
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GAME, the new novel by Jack Cadillac and Jimmy Eldorado, is available now: http://www.amazon.com/Game-Jack-Cadillac/dp/1489508309/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369771572&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=game+cadillace
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