Wow, what a week. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m really feeling like a little gratuitous comic-book violence would be just the thing I need to get my weekend started right. You guys know anywhere I can find some gratuitous comic-book violence around here? Maybe right here, ’cause it’s time for FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

Tonight’s dose of brutality comes from 2005’s JSA Classified #4 by Geoff Johns, Amanda Conner, and Jimmy Palmiotti: Power Girl vents her frustrations on the Psycho-Pirate’s gold-plated jaw:

 

 

 

Gesundheit!

Hmm, someone’s gonna have to get the extra-absorbent tissues to clean up this mess…

Huzzah! The air conditioner’s fixed! And my breath is minty-fresh!

Now on to the reviews!

Hulk #5

The Red Hulk kicks Thor’s butt, Iron Man and the Fantastic Four try to figure out if Doc Samson is really the Red Hulk, and A-Bomb (Rick Jones as the blue-skinned version of the Abomination) fishes the regular green Hulk out of San Francisco Bay.

Verdict: There’s not really much to the story, but I’m gonna give it a thumbs up. Ed McGuinness knows how to draw one heck of a slugfest. Conclusion of this storyline is next issue, so I assume they’ll reveal what faked-up and idiotic excuse they’ve dredged up to claim that Red Hulk is someone other than Doc Samson…

Teen Titans #61

Kid Devil and Blue Beetle team up to track down a supervillain called Shockwave. Kid Devil blames Shockwave for putting him on the outs with the rest of the Titans, while Beetle is after him because he’s targeting companies that used to be owned by Ted Kord, the previous Blue Beetle.

Verdict: Thumbs up. But mainly because a lot of the focus is on Blue Beetle, who’s just plain awesome.

Whooo dawg, the apartment is still cookin’ like an oven, and I feel like I been wrung out like a rag. The A/C is still dead, and taking cold showers and sleeping under fans didn’t really help me stay cool or sleep very well. So I don’t feel like reviewing any comics where happy things happen to happy people. I feel like reviewing comics where very, very, very bad things happen to people who weren’t very nice to begin with.

 

Crossed #0

A nice little prologue for Garth Ennis’ upcoming horror series. A pleasant evening out at the local diner suddenly turns into car crashes, plane crashes, a nuke, and bloody mass murder. This is basically a zombie story, except the butchers aren’t dead — they’re normal people who’ve caught some condition that turns them into gleefully psychotic killers. And the only way to tell them apart (aside from the severed body parts they tend to carry around and their evil, evil smiles) is the ugly red rash that forms a cross over their faces.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Mayhem and butchery? Gimme more o’ that. A nice claustrophobic, paranoid, ultra-violent beginning to the story. Can’t wait for the rest. Oh, and this is not a comic for kids. There is a great deal of violence and swearing and worse stuff that I’m not going to describe, because the head honchos here will protest. “You said you’d never use that word in combination with that word in describing that particular very rude act! Much less with a knife wound OR a kitten! For shame!” Fine, fine. Anyway, if you ain’t grown up enough to handle the rough stuff, don’t read it.

 

House of Mystery #4

Fig continues to try to adjust to her new life in the House of Mystery. She chats with a crazy ham enthusiast, fights with cranky Cress, and tries to beat up the house with a sledgehammer. Meanwhile, our spotlight story this issue is told by the punk witch princess Daphne — she tells about her flight from her witch-filled home dimension before the robotic invasion of the Thinking Man’s Army. To hide her properly, she, along with her bodyguard, a talking leopard named Floyd, gets teleported into a mundane world and deprived of her true name. To return home, all she has to do is kiss her true love and learn her true name. Unfortunately, she and Floyd have a great deal more fun just hacking up her boyfriends whenever they don’t make the cut.

Verdict: Thumbs up. The main story is a bit drab, but Daphne and Floyd are so fun and twisted and bloody and cynical, it pushes it straight over the top.

 

Hey, guess what?! My air conditioner’s gone kaput! Yay! Now I get to die of heatstroke inside my own apartment! Yay!

I may have to do a bit less blogging than normal if it doesn’t get fixed soon. I don’t think sweat is good for my keyboard.

Excuse me — gonna see if I can fit myself inside my refrigerator…

If you’ve been reading Top Cow’s “Pilot Season” comics, it’s finally time to start voting on your favorites.

Just go to Top Cow’s website or the “Pilot Season” MySpace page and cast your vote. You can vote once a day for the entire month of August. The top two vote-getters will get their own series next year.

I’ve enjoyed all the “Pilot Season” books I’ve read this year — it’s too bad that they can’t all get their own series.

(I’ve previously reviewed “Twilight Guardian,” “Genius,” and “Urban Myths” and interviewed the creators of “Genius.”)

This is just for you comics-loving Lubbockites out there — if you haven’t heard the news yet, as of today, new comics arrive at Star Comics on Wednesdays instead of Thursdays!

See, Lubbock is actually right on the dividing line between the East Coast and West Coast shippers — all of Texas is served by the shippers on the East Coast, and Lubbock is the farthest away on the shipping lanes. I bet even Amarillo is farther up the chain than we are, since they’re located on the big Interstate. Anyway, that means that Lubbock really is at the very tail-end of the shipping schedules, so while the rest of the country got their new comics every Wednesday, we’ve always gotten ours on Thursdays.

But somehow or other, possibly using magic or some sort of theoretical hyper-science, we’re now going to get comics on Wednesday, the same day that everyone else in the country gets theirs. HUZZAH!

So, Lubbockites, you no longer have to wait for Thursday to pick up your comics. Stop by Star after work today, and they should have all the latest comics.

 

H.P. Lovecraft’s Haunt of Horror #2

More of Lovecraft’s stories and poetry re-imagined in comic format by brilliant horror illustrator Richard Corben. We open with “The Music of Erich Zann,” retold in a fairly straightforward fashion. After that, Lovecraft’s poem “The Canal” gets reinterpreted into a nightmarish saga of a horrible flood, and HPL’s poem “The Lamp” becomes a story about explorers in a defiled Egyptian tomb.

Verdict: Thumbs up. I didn’t start out liking this one as much as I liked the previous issue, but on slower re-reading, there’s more stuff I actually enjoy here. There’s the perfect decayed city architecture that Lovecraft preferred, there’s the creepy textual version of Zann’s music, the transcription of the modern nightmare of post-Katrina New Orleans, the invisible menace freed from the crypt. This is beautiful work, simultaneously subtle and gory. If you love horror, especially Lovecraftian cosmic horror, go get this comic.

 

Locke and Key #6

In the finale of this series, psychotic Sam Lesser has the upper hand, with Tyler Locke under the gun, his mother and cousin locked in the wine cellar, and sister Kinsey clubbed into unconsciousness. Sam is after a couple of mystical keys — the same keys the spirit in the well wants Bode Locke to find. Bode goes through the magic door that turns him into a ghost so he can find the keys — once he gives the “Anywhere Key” to the spirit, she takes it, walks out a door, and vanishes. Meanwhile, Tyler tries to get away from Sam, falls against the “ghost door” and, as far as Sam can tell, dies. Is there going to be any way to stop Sam before he kills the rest of the family, too?

Verdict: Thumbs up. A good mix of suspense, mundane chase/action sequences, and extremely creepy weirdness. I wish we’d seen a bit more about the family’s ancestral home, the Keyhouse, as it looked like it’d make for a wonderful haunted house. There’s also word that there’s a new series on the way toward the end of the year.

 

Pigeons from Hell #4

The Blassenville sisters and the sheriff return to the old plantation to do battle against the horror inside. After that, there’s a great deal of chaos.

Verdict: Thumbs down. I’ve been loving this series, but the final chapter just doesn’t measure up. And I gotta put the blame on the artwork. It’s just too dark, too muddy, too confusing. I read the original story, so I should have a pretty good idea about what’s going on here, but I just couldn’t keep track of what was going on.

 

Mini Marvels: Rock, Paper, Scissors

If you’ve ever wondered what the Marvel superheroes would look like if they were drawn by “Peanuts” creator Charles M. Schulz, look no further. This is actually a collection of the “Mini Marvels” comic strips that appear in the back of many regular Marvel comics, and they’re just impossibly adorable. We get Wolverine going out to get his favorite cereal, the somewhat depressing saga of Spidey’s paper route, Hulk taking Betty out on a date to the malt shop, Iron Man giving all his friends their own powered armor, and the brilliant, kid-friendly re-imagining of the “Planet Hulk” and “World War Hulk” storylines.

Verdict: Several thumbs up. Chris Giarusso’s artwork and writing are simply wonderful. Wolverine’s back-and-forth with the very dim-witted grocery store clerk is great, as is Hulk’s date with Betty and Professor X’s Charlie Brown hairdo, but the high point is absolutely the “World War Hulk” story. I’d really love to give away the funniest gag, just because it had me laughing so hard, but if you wanna find it, just look around for the stuff about haiku.

It’s about $10, but it’s worth at least twice that. Go pick it up.

 

Blue Beetle #29

Jaime runs into a couple of low-rent supervillains who are in the middle of a wrestling match to determine who will get to be the new Hellhound, while Paco and Brenda go on a “Not-A-Date.” Meanwhile, Peacemaker, who’s gotten involved with a Minutemanesque anti-illegal-immigrants patrol organization, and they try to round up some aliens who inject themselves with instant superpowers. Blue Beetle shows up to help out, but they’re able to get away after leaving a “hostage” behind. All that plus a connection to Intergang, the international crime organization run by Apokolips.

Verdict: Thumbs up. There’s a bit too much going on in the story, but I’m thrilled that the fill-in writers are still doing such a great job on characterization and dialogue. Probably the most embarrassing part of the book is the front-cover credits which say John Rogers wrote the story — come on, DC, Rogers hasn’t been writing this book in months. Get it together.

It’s the triumphant return of Bahlactus’ Big Bad Brawlfest — better known as FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

The theme this time is “Ladies Night” — and yeah, that means each entry has to feature some fine feminine fisticuffs. So to kick things off with one single, wonderful panel from this year’s Birds of Prey #117 by Sean McKeever, Nicola Scott, and Doug Hazlewood: Misfit teleports all around a room administering copious amounts of whoopass:

To celebrate this auspicious beginning of the latest round of Friday Night Fights, I’m asking all you gals out there to go beat the snot out of someone tonight. As for you guys… just stay outta their way, a’ight?

Justice Society of America Annual #1

In the last regular issue of “Justice Society of America,” Gog, in the process of fulfilling a number of wishes for the Justice Society, sent Power Girl home — to her original home on Earth-2. Kara gets reacquainted with all the retro heroes, and the Huntress makes plans to kill the Joker. And Power Girl discovers something very unwelcome about Earth-2.

Verdict: Thumbs down. Sorry, but I just never got into Earth-2’s heroes, and there’s really not much here but fanboy nostalgia. I did get a kick out of the elderly and decrepit — but still dangerous — version of the Joker. But that wasn’t enough to make it a win for me.

Green Lantern #33

We continue our re-telling of Hal Jordan’s origin. Sinestro — at this point in his history, still a Green Lantern — knocks out loony telepath Hector Hammond, then he and Hal go hunting the alien demon Atrocitus, who’s after a kid named William Hand — the future supervillain Black Hand.

Verdict: Another thumbs down. It’s just not coming across as very interesting.

She-Hulk #31

It appears I’ve missed a few issues of this. The Skrull Invasion is beginning, and Shulkie and Jazinda are tracking a Skrull called the Talisman, a religious figure whose well-being will determine how the invasion will go. If they can take him out quickly enough, the entire Skrull army will give up the invasion and flee for their home. They run into X-Factor, now re-imagined as a bunch of private eyes. They’re after completely different targets, but She-Hulk gets into a fight with the X-Factor kids that even she admits is an incredibly stupid and pointless thing to do. Jazinda, meanwhile, catches up with who she claims is the Talisman — namely, Longshot. Jazinda gets knocked out by Darwin, a rapidly evolving mutant, but Darwin later spontaneously evolves a power that forces Skrulls to reveal themselves. And as it turns out, yep, Longshot’s a Skrull.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Sure, I missed a few issues, but I was still enjoying what I was reading, so I approve.