No, we’re not talking about the turkey you’re gonna be shoving down your gullet tomorrow — we’re talking comics with light-hearted themes and comics that are wallowing in the bleak and horrific side of things. Let’s go with the light stuff first…

Captain Carrot and the Final Ark #2

Frogzilla’s back, and the Zoo Crew’s best chance of beating him lies with… Alley-Kat-Abra?! But isn’t she in prison for murder? Turns out that the evil wizard Feline Faust created an evil doppelganger of Alley, and she did all the bad stuff while the real Alley was trapped in a prison dimension. Umm, yes, sounds likely, ya think? Once Frogzilla is turned back into J. Fenimore Frog, the Zoo Crew head for the ocean depths to track the undersea terrorist Salamandroid. Unfortunately, it’s a trap, and the team is attacked by Starro the Conqueror’s face-hugging starfish. On top of that, Vicuna Pacos is revealed as the mad environmentalist immortal Rash Al Paca, and he has plans to flood the entire planet!

Verdict: Thumbs up. The art is wonderful, the puns are wonderful, the jokes are funny, and I’m still pretty happy with the story — though I gotta admit I’m worried about the conclusion next issue. This is a “Countdown” tie-in, and all the “Countdown” comics seem to be designed to be depressing and horrible. I hope this series bucks the trend.

Now for the dark stuff…

B.P.R.D.: Killing Ground #4

Okay, this one’s got more shocks than a toaster in a bathtub. Brace yerself, kids.

A bomb has blown up in Ben Daimo’s room, and the mysterious man who’s been stalking the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense’s compound… well, he stands there and lets Abe Sapien shoot a hole through his chest. What the heck did he want? We don’t have time to find out, because Daimo comes out of the bombed-out firestorm that used to be his quarters… and he’s turned into a nine-foot-tall ravening monster!

Liz Sherman goes catatonic while the sinister mastermind in her head tells her stories of armageddons. The Daimonster starts tearing soldiers apart until Johann Straus, wearing his superstrong body, shows up to beat the stuffing out of it. Unfortunately, the monster manages to rip Johann’s throat out. His body’s dying, but he’s really just a spirit inside of a body — his ectoplasm emerges and — wait a minute, that’s not Johann Strauss! That’s… Lobster Johnson! Then he runs into the infirmary and shoots Liz!

You are probably now asking yourself, “What is this amazing spicy sandwich I’m eating? What is this sammich with a kick like a mule and all the sweet, confusing joy in the universe crammed inside?” My friends, that is one of Mike Mignola’s signature OMGWTFBBQ sandwiches, and your taste buds will never be the same again.

Verdict: Thumbs up. No, I have no earthly idea what the heck was going on. But holy moley, what a ride! Is this Mike Mignola’s best year ever? And one more issue of this storyline to go? Do not miss out on this one, folks.

Wonder Woman #14

This is a series that has had a lot of problems. After they relaunched it last year, they started a new storyline that they weren’t able to finish — they actually started a new storyarc and delayed the last issue of the old one almost a year. After that, there were way too many months of novelist Jodi Picoult’s less-than-acceptable writing. But new writer Gail Simone has a lot of people entertaining high hopes that this title is going to get very good very quickly.

Plotwise, this issue sees Wonder Woman fighting off and then befriending a bunch of genetically engineered super-gorillas from Gorilla City, and then undertaking a mission in her secret identity as superspy Diana Prince to capture Gorilla Grodd for the Department of Metahuman Affairs — except it’s not Grodd, it’s Captain Nazi and a horde of his evil Nazi minions! You know what that means? It means next issue is going to feature a Guatemalan megaton of Nazi-stompage. Good times for us all!

This issue has several small moments that still come across as unusually cool. There’s Wonder Woman letting the rogue gorillas live in her apartment for a while, and one of them apologizing for the “flinging incident.” There’s also Agent Prince getting a surprise birthday party and getting stuck with a mouthful of birthday cake just as the boss wants to talk to her.

But the really interesting thing is the re-introduction of Etta Candy, one of Wondy’s oldest supporting cast members. Back in the ’40s, Etta was — not to mince words — fat. But she was loud and enthusiastic and funny and positive, and she kicked about nine kinds of ass every issue. This new version of Etta is Lt. Colonel Candy, an undercover government operative who’s looking for a good excuse to ruin Wondy’s life. And she’s not fat anymore. Frankly, I don’t think she even qualifies as overweight. Sure, she’s not the comic-book world’s ideal — but as she’s depicted here, if you met her in real life, you’d certainly classify her as a knockout. I’m not sure what I think of this new character yet. I may end up liking the character, but I really did kinda like the old chubby version of Etta.

Verdict: Thumbs up. I’m hoping this comic continues to stay good.

Booster Gold #4

Booster has just crashed Rip Hunter’s Time Sphere into a Cosmic Treadmill being driven by the Silver Age Flash and Kid Flash. Booster and Rip follow the trail of the renegade Time Sphere back to Central City, and they find themselves facing a former Time Master named Rex Hunter, along with an evil Skeets and the secret bad guy who is now wearing the Supernova uniform. The Flashes both vanished — they’ve stopped existing because they’ve gone back to the night that Barry Allen got his powers, and Supernova installed a lightning rod on his building to keep him from being struck by lightning. Can they save the Flashes, save the future, and stop the bad guys?

So far, every issue of this comic has surprised me with how good it is. I don’t know that my expectations for it have been low, but it does seem to be the kind of comic that stays below the radar. Half the people who should be reading this are probably passing it up because they can’t imagine a good comic with Booster Gold as the star. But all the time-travel shenanigans plus all the superhero action and banter are really producing some excellent stories. I think this is definitely one you should be reading.

Verdict: Thumbs up. And next issue’s gonna be one you’ll definitely want to read: Can Booster stop the Joker from paralyzing Barbara Gordon?

In the distant misty mists of prehistory, humanity was born with a burning thirst for both righteous violence and weekend maxxin’ and relaxxin’. But for millennia, none have known how to combine these twin desires. But now, we have the secret formula! We have… Friday Night Fights!

From “World War Hulk #5” by Greg Pak and John Romita, Jr., a series which was apparently designed with Friday Night Fights in mind: Hulk introduces the Sentry to his fist.

Umm, the Sentry really seems to be getting into the horrific and brutal Hulk-beating a bit too much. “Just once more”? Takes all kinds to make a world, but I just hope Hulk knows the safeword…

 

World War Hulk #5

It’s the last chapter of this series, as the mega-powerful Sentry shows up to try to take Hulk down. Completely spoiler-free review: There is a LOT of hitting.

Verdict: Thumbs up. There’s really no way they could’ve ended it with the big bang that ended every issue of this series, but I think it ended well. So many pure-action superhero epics end up devolving into plotless and characterization-less exercises in mindless brutality. This has been a high-quality and very exciting story all the way through.

 

Metal Men #4

Lots of stuff happens, both in the present and the past. The Proto-Metal Men defeat Chemo in the past, the current Metal Men have to deal with a new tendency to temporarily turn evil — or as they call it, turning into “radioactive werewolves.” On top of that, Lead has been transmuted into Gold and vice versa — so the old Gold is now a bit dumb and dull, while the old Lead is now a supergenius. The Missile Men make an appearance, though they’re now called the M-80s, Dr. Morrow is a robot imposter, and Dr. Magnus’ badass evil brother shows up.

Verdict: Well, I love the stuff with Lead, I mean Gold, I mean Lead… but the rest of it is confusing as heck. We’ve been told that this will start making sense soon, but if that’s the case, I wish they’d just published the full story all at once so I wouldn’t have to wait 30 days between chapters in the hopes that it’ll make sense. Thumbs down.

 

Titans East Special

Actually, I didn’t buy this one. The ending of this was telegraphed to just about everyone — they lined up a bunch of DC teenagers, including (ugh) Power Boy, Little Barda, the current Hawk and Dove, Lagoon Boy, Son of Vulcan, and Anima, and they just killed ’em all.

Why? I really don’t know. It’s not like the Titans haven’t had enough deaths in the past few years, what with losing Superboy, Kid Flash, Pantha, Wildebeest, Terra, and others. I think DC has a quota — “Must pointlessly kill X number of characters per week.”

One wonders if the people running DC right now are actually trying to destroy the company by killing off all their characters and simultaneously running off all their customers. Could someone please call Time-Warner Inc. and ask if they’ve checked in on their DC subsidiary lately? Maybe they’ll appoint a editor-in-chief who’s not crazy…

Yeah, I know it’s supposed to warm up later today. By this afternoon, it’ll be downright comfortable.

But for right now? First major cold snap Lubbock has had this winter? I think I should just go back to bed and try to stay warm, right?

Coulda been worse, I guess. It could’ve snowed. It’s weird how many Lubbock drivers have no clue how to drive on snowy or icy roads…

Astonishing X-Men #23

This one was sooooo cool.

Let’s review: Last issue, the X-Men were on the run, and a powerless Cyclops decided on a plan for him to lure the Breakworldians away on an escape pod so the rest of the team could escape. And the Breakworldians blow up his ship and kill him.

And in this issue, the Breakworldians bring him back to life just so they can torture him into revealing details of the X-Men’s Leviathan program. Wolverine and Armor are captured, while Beast, Emma Frost, Colossus, and Shadowcat make their own plans. And Cyclops reveals that the entire team knew all along that the Breakworldians were spying on them. What follows is this wonderful of last issue’s debate as the team prepares to send Cyclops off to his death — this time, however, with the added psionic thought-balloons as everyone telepathically makes their real plans. “Leviathan” is a hoax, designed solely to get Kruun, the Breakworldian leader, to bring Cyk back to life to interrogate him about the “doomsday device.”

Frustrated, Kruun says lies are humanity’s greatest weapon and demands to know what other lies Cyclops has told. Turns out that the “powerless” Cyclops isn’t powerless any more.

Verdict: Secret telepathic conversations, Kitty’s awful acting, and four pages devoted to a single optic blast make this a very solid thumbs up.

 

Special Forces #1

Kyle Baker must have one of the more varied resumes of any cartoonist out there, except for maybe Jack Cole. Baker does Warner Brothers-esque animation cartooning like “Plastic Man,” he does dead-serious superhero fare like “Truth: Red, White and Black,” and he does everything in between. And the guy’s got serious interests in politics, race, and social justice — hence the aforementioned “Red, White and Black,” hence “Birth of a Nation” with Aaron McGruder and Reginald Hudlin, hence his series on Nat Turner, leader of one of the most significant slave rebellions of the old South.

And then there’s this comic, which takes as one of its inspirations an incident in which an autistic teenager was recruited by the Army and then released from his enlistment contract when the scandal went public. So our story is about a recruitment officer who’s given an ultimatum — make his recruitment quota, or he ships out to Iraq. Desperate, he signs up a bunch of completely unfit losers but just barely misses quota, so he is assigned command of the soldiers he recruited. And as you’d expect, complete disaster ensues. Our two main characters here are Felony, a juvenile delinquent whose torn mini-T and short-shorts don’t seem to be standard military issue, and Zone, an autistic soldier who, despite his other difficulties, is the perfect soldier.

The cover makes this look like it’s a comedy, but it isn’t. Holy cow, is this ever one non-funny comic book. The first page features a closeup of a guy’s head exploding. And it doesn’t get any cleaner from there. The comic is jam-packed with blood, guts, death, cussing — and not fun stuff, not a bit of it. This isn’t some “War is All Glory, Salute for Uncle Sam” action movie — this is violent, chaotic, terrifying, depressing stuff. And the characters really do draw you into the action — these guys aren’t Sgt. Rock or Nick Fury or recruiting-poster supermen — they’re schlubs, like you and me and 90% of the civilian populace. Seeing action heroes get blown up by RPGs wouldn’t be as affecting as seeing truly ordinary people get dusted. ‘Cause that could be you or me. And the real soldiers, with the actual training, are going through this every single day over there.

Artistically, this is pretty great stuff. I quibble with the way Felony is depicted — she’s got eyes like dinner plates and cheekbones you could land a jet on — but man alive, can Baker ever draw action. The chopper crash is one of the most exciting and cinematic pieces of artwork I’ve ever seen, and the first and last pages really do pack a big punch.

Verdict: Thumbs up. This is harrowing stuff, but it’s really masterful storytelling.

I’m taking another short break from comics stuff to review something that’s not a comic book.

The Dethalbum by Dethklok

A little background — because, yes, you need to know some of the backstory here to really appreciate this CD. Cartoon Network has a late-night programming block called “Adult Swim” for cartoons that are designed to appeal to grownups more than kids — some anime programs like “Cowboy Bebop,” “FLCL,” and “Paranoia Agent,” some syndicated rebroadcasts from other networks like “Futurama” and “Family Guy,” even some live-action shows like “Saved by the Bell” and “Peewee’s Playhouse.” But most of what they do is original cartoons like “Space Ghost Coast to Coast,” “Sealab 2021,” “Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law,” “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” and “Robot Chicken.”

One of their recent hits has been a show called “Metalocalypse,” which features what is my — and probably your — ideal dream world: a world where the greatest and most influential cultural force on the planet is a death metal band called Dethklok. As the 12th largest economy on earth, with billions of fans so fanatical that they’ll sign “pain waivers” to absolve the band from any liability if the fans are horribly mutilated or killed during their shows, the members of Dethklok are free to spend their days being impossibly rich and utterly incompetent, but still 110% metal and brutal.

The band members include brooding lead singer Nathan Explosion, Swedish guitarist Skwisgaar Skwigelf (the fastest guitarist in the world), Norwegian guitarist Toki Wartooth (the second-fastest guitarist in the world), self-loathing bassist William Murderface, and balding, dreadlocked drummer, Pickles the Drummer. The show, created by Brendan Small and Tommy Blacha, is chock full of cameo appearances by heavy metal musicians and seriously awesome heavy metal music.

Which leads us to this CD. It’s not a soundtrack of the show — it’s a bunch of the music snippets we have heard Dethklok play, but expanded to full length, and there are some brand new songs, too. The regular CD has 16 tracks — I got the deluxe CD, which has an extra seven tracks, plus a music video and an episode from the show. You may have already heard that this CD debuted on the Billboard charts at #21, making it the highest charting death metal album ever.

So how is it? It’s good. It’s really, really good. Yes, the songs are often pretty humorous. You’ve got “Fansong,” which is a song about how much the band hates its own fans, you’ve got “Dethharmonic,” which is a tribute to greed, backed by a symphony orchestra. It’s got “Murmaider,” which is about mermaids and killing people with a wide variety of deadly weapons in the depths of the ocean. It’s got songs with titles like “Hatredcopter,” “Castratikron,” “Briefcase Full of Guts,” and “Bloodtrocuted.”

And despite some of the goofy content, this stuff will absolutely rock your face off. It’s brutal, it’s unrelenting, it’s everything you want from a metal album. Every metal fan who listens to this is gonna be banging his or her head by the time the first song is over. And believe it or not, it’s also catchy as hell, which means, if it gets any kind of mainstream play out there, it’s almost guaranteed to manufacture more metal fans.

And I’m amazed that this whole album was blasted out by only a very few musicians. Brandon Small, the show’s creator, does the vocals, guitars, bass, and keyboards, while Gene Hoglan (from Dark Angel, Death, and Strapping Young Lad) works the drums. Heavy metal violinist Emilie Autumn performs as the entire symphony on “Dethharmonic.”

To make a long review short: If you’re a metalhead, you should go get this album. You will love it. If you’re not a metalhead, you should probably get it anyway, because this CD will turn you totally metal, and the world needs more metal heads. If you can find it, grab the deluxe edition, just because it has the “Duncan Hills Coffee Jingle,” which is the most metal coffee jingle ever, but if you can’t find the deluxe edition, get the regular version, which is still metal enough to shred the meat from your bones.

If it’s Friday night, you know what that means, Bahlactus demands that everyone get busy with mayhem, melees, and mangling! Dare we refuse his demand? NAY! Let the Friday Night Fights commence!

From “Biff Bam Pow #1” by Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer, One-Punch Goldberg, former space-boxer, lives up to her nickname by rattling the empty skull of an obnoxious autograph-seeker:

When you’re not only a boxer, but a boxer… IN SPAAAAACE… that really ratchets up your level of badassery.