The Unwritten #9

A secret strikeforce of assassins has invaded the prison where Tom Taylor is being held, killing everyone they can in an attempt to kick off a riot and assassinate Tom. An apparition of the literary knight Roland is roaming the prison grounds. Tom and Savoy are trying to get themselves out and help Lizzie Hexam get free before they’re all killed, with the aid of a winged cat and a magic doorknob, all while the warden and his two hyper-imaginative children run about the grounds. And it all ends tragically.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Beautifully written, beautifully illustrated. But man, what a kick in the gut that ending was.

Strange #3

Stephen Strange, almost-powerless former Sorcerer Supreme, and his new apprentice Casey, have been recruited by a demon named Larry to help foil a plot by a smarmy upstart demon named Virilian to steal souls by fixing a kiddie beauty pageant. While Dr. Strange and Larry travel to Hell to look up some of Virilian’s former clients, Casey is left behind disguised as one of the eight-year-old contestants to keep an eye on the proceedings. While she has to watch the all-too-human evil of the pageant mothers, she eventually realizes that Virilian has made a much more sinister bargain. Can Strange, Casey, and Larry fix everything in time?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Wow, all those crazed pageant mothers make some of the most awful villains of the year. Very nicely written by Mark Waid. Too bad this one is just a miniseries — it looks like the next one will be the final issue.

Daytripper #1

This is a new series by Brazilian twin brothers Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon, who have done art chores for “The Umbrella Academy” and “Casanova,” along with other comics here and there. This one focuses on Brás de Oliva Domingos, a Brazilian man working as an editorial writer. His father is a famous writer, and Brás would like to be a writer, too, but outside of work, he’s plagued by writer’s block. On his birthday, he goes, somewhat unwillingly, to an event for his father, visits a bar for some smokes… and gets an unwelcome surprise.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Oooh, did I not have enough description up there? Was it all a bit vague? Too bad, perfesser — it’s got a nice shocker of a cliffhanger, and I don’t much wanna spoil it. But the art is beautiful, the dialogue and characterization are first-rate, and the whole thing is extraordinarily intriguing. I’m looking forward to seeing where this one will lead us.

The Unwritten #8

This one is actually something of a flashback to previous issues of this series, but this time, our focus is on Chadron, the warden of the French prison where Tom Taylor is being held — and in particular, on Chadron’s two children. Chadron is himself a huge fan of the Tommy Taylor fantasy novels and engages in a lot of imaginative roleplaying with young Cosi and Peter, but his wife is no fan of all the foolishness. She’s concerned that the children — Cosi especially — are dwelling too deeply in their fantasy world. Cosi draws magic symbols on the windows and attacks a couple of schoolmates while pretending to cast magic spells. A psychiatrist diagnoses her with a mild psychosis — she has trouble telling fantasy from reality. But can the children’s faith in the Tommy Taylor fantasy save their father and the real Tom Taylor?

Verdict: Thumbs up. I was kinda hoping we’d get to meet the warden’s family a bit more, as he’s developed into an unexpectedly fascinating character — part hard-nosed prison administrator, part doting, fantasy-loving father. The rest of the family seems equally interesting, from the children’s utter faith in the Tommy Taylor fiction, to their mother’s complete hostility about the fantasy lives that she can’t join.

Strange #2

Last issue, Stephen Strange taught a minor vanishing spell to Casey and magicked up her glasses so they’d be able to see the capital-T Truth of anything she looked at. Now she’s trying to track Strange down again to see if he can teach her more magic, and in the process, she’s making a lot of stuff vanish — irritating cell phones, parking tickets, a moving van. She runs into a few people who claim they know who Stephen Strange is, but they’re all either con men or lunatics — or, in one case, a demonic monster who’s willing to eat her for asking the wrong questions. Luckily, Strange shows up to save her, and is surprised that Casey is still able to use the small spells that he meant to be temporary — but it turns out the vanishing spell doesn’t really make things vanish — it just sends them to another dimension. And the sole inhabitant of that dimension is tired of Casey using his dimension as a junkyard. Strange and Casey have to pay the interdimensional monster a visit to beg him not to kill them — but is he going to be willing to listen to a couple of mostly-powerless humans?

Verdict: Thumbs up. I’m still enjoying this much-more relaxed version of Dr. Strange, and the characterization for Casey — midway between a spoiled rich girl with abandonment issues and a quick-thinking magical neophyte who can’t plan more than two seconds ahead — is also a lot of fun.

Dr. Horrible #1

If you loved “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” — the genre-busting Emmy-winning web-based musical-supervillain-romantic-tragicomedy created by “Buffy”-creator Joss Whedon and family, and starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day… Wow, I’ve already forgotten how this sentence started. Anyway, Dark Horse Comics just put out a one-shot comic about Dr. Horrible! The story is written by Zack Whedon, who is not only Joss Whedon’s brother but one of the screenwriters! This looks like a prequel, with Dr. Horrible’s origin and his earliest misadventures. See Dr. Horrible plant bombs in parking meters! See his first pain-filled confrontations with the heroic but dim-witted Captain Hammer! See the whinnying villainy of Bad Horse! See Dr. Horrible’s terrifying conveyance, the Horrible Mobile! See Dr. Horrible’s plot to even the odds against his arch-nemesis by giving himself Captain Hammer’s powers!

Verdict: Thumbs up. Loooooved it. Great story, great art. Don’t know what else I could say about it — if you were a fan of the “Dr. Horrible” miniseries, then you’re probably going to love this one, too. Here’s hoping they’ll be able to turn this into an ongoing series.

Batgirl #4

I’ve had enough people tell me this was a good series that it finally wore down my resistance. For those new to the series, it stars Stephanie Brown, who used to be the Spoiler and, briefly, Robin. She’s now taken up the mantle of Batgirl, with the technological assistance of Barbara Gordon, the first Batgirl and the current wheelchair-bound super-hacker Oracle. Much of this story is told during a blackout in Gotham City — Barbara needs to see to a personal matter at Leslie Thompkins’ clinic, leaving Stephanie to take care of much of the city’s chaos by herself. She stops a purse-snatching and takes on the electricity-powered supervillain Livewire.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Outstanding dialogue and lots of good, humorous situations going on. The subplot with Wendy, formerly the Teen Titans’ resident code-monkey before she was attacked and paralyzed by a shapeshifting demon dog, was very good. It’s too bad “Birds of Prey” isn’t around anymore, but I’m glad to see there’s still a place in the DCU for Barbara Gordon.

The Unwritten #7

Tom Taylor is stuck in a French prison, suspected in the brutal murders of a half-dozen people — and he’s just met Frankenstein’s monster, who seems to want to help him, except Tom doesn’t want to believe he exists. On his way back to his cell, he’s attacked by a bunch of guards who’ve been paid to kill him, but he’s saved by Savoy, his cellmate — and one of the guards is accidentally killed. Lizzie Hexam, meanwhile, has gotten herself sent to the same prison, hoping to help Tom out of his predicament. Tom and Savoy are placed in isolation cells after the guard’s death, and Savoy reveals that he’s not really in jail for any crime — he’s a journalist who bribed his way into the prison so he could write about Tom. And while Tom is telling the story from “The Song of Roland” — when they see a vision of Roland himself, blowing his horn to summon Charlemagne. Does this portend more bad things for Tom? Probably…

Verdict: Thumbs up. Weird, spooky, literary stuff. Oh no, not literary! Settle down, young ‘un, it won’t hurt you to learn something once in a while. I am grooving on the “Song of Roland” stuff, and I’m dying to see how it’s all going to play out.

Sir Edward Grey, Witchfinder: In the Service of Angels #4

Sir Edward, the Captain, and Miss Wolf have been cornered by the vampiric demon, but they still manage to drive it out of the defiled church. Grey gives chase, but runs into a bunch of mooks from the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ray, an Egypt-focused magical secret society, which plans to capture the monster with a bunch of guys armed with electrically-charged harpoons and knockout gas. That doesn’t really turn out that well for them, what with the blood and the murder and the screaming and the dismemberments. Later, Grey gets to spend some quiet time with Miss Wolf, recounting his own past and the less-than-honorable history of the last man to bear the “Witchfinder” title. And the investigation into the monster’s origins leads Sir Edward and the Captain to Bedlam Hospital, where they meet a man who should be familiar to readers of recent “B.P.R.D.” comics…

Verdict: Thumbs up. Nice creepy fun. Beautifully cinematic artwork by Ben Stenbeck, too. This story has giant, blood-soaked monsters, steampunk weaponry, zombie puritans, madhouses, and drinking beer with pretty girls — it’s a winner in every possible way.

The Unwritten #6

Tom Taylor has been accused of a horrific mass murder in Frankenstein’s castle — otherwise known as his boyhood home — and he’s now going to prison in a town called Roncevaux. That’s the setting of “The Song of Roland,” an epic poem written in the 12th century about the massacre of part of Charlemagne’s army by the Saracens because their commander, Roland, is too proud to summon the rest of the army for help. For a book focused on the uncomfortable connections between literature and the real world, that’s not too ominous, is it? Tom slowly becomes accustomed to prison life, Lizzie Hexam looks for her next orders in random books in a bookstore, and the prison warden, a dedicated fan of the “Tommy Taylor” novels, tries to deal with his feelings about locking up someone he can’t help seeing as the hero of his favorite books. And finally, Tommy meets a new, heavily scarred ally…

Verdict: Thumbs up. Wow, this story keeps getting better and better. I wasn’t expecting a big mixture of prison drama and high French literature, but this comic actually pulls it off. And there’s a really cool moment with the hardnosed warden reading his children bedtime stories.

The Unwritten #5

Tom Taylor doesn’t appear in this issue — instead, we visit a previous century and take a look at the life of British author Rudyard Kipling. We follow him as a young reporter in India, frustrated that he can’t tell the stories he wants to. He ends up making a deal, almost entirely by accident, with Mr. Locke, who tells him that he’ll arrange that Kipling will be able to spin his stories for the glories of British Imperialism. And Kipling’s books, like “Gunga Din,” “On the Road to Mandalay,” and “The Light that Failed,” enjoy uncommon success. He is disturbed when, after Locke expresses his disdain for Oscar Wilde’s work, Wilde is unexpectedly arrested and put on trial for sodomy.

On a tour of America, he meets Mark Twain, who warns him that Locke may be a dangerous man, and Locke later tells Kipling that he wants him to remain in America to chronicle America’s rise, instead of England’s decline. Kipling, ever the loyalist, refuses, and soon pays the price, as his daughter Josephine falls ill and is then murdered by Pullman, the seemingly immortal assassin. Unable to write for a year, Kipling eventually turns his attention to fables and his “Just-So Stories” — his own simple declaration of war against Locke and his cronies. But the world continues as Locke had predicted — World War I swallows England whole, and Kipling’s own son joins up to fight and is soon reported MIA. Desperate, he begs for his son’s life from Locke. Will the old fable-teller be able to pull off one last bit of literary magic?

Verdict: Thumbs up. A nice change-of-pace, and a nice look at the strange history of the world that this comic resides in. Kipling lived an interesting but tragic life, but I never saw him as a fantasy hero before. It’s a sad story, but a fun one at the same time.

Power Girl #5

A spaceship has crashed in Prospect Park, and Kara heads up for the apartment roof to change into her costume — hey! Is someone taking pictures of her? There’s gonna be trouble later. Meanwhile, the spaceship almost shoots Power Girl while aiming at a pursuing ship, and while she tears her way inside, the three beautiful alien women inside come out to meet the New Yorkers gawking at the ship. PeeGee meets up with a hunky male android just before the ship self-destructs. Something — possibly Power Girl herself — somehow contains the explosion, but she’s left severely injured in the aftermath. Luckily, she recovers fast once she gets a little sunlight. After bonding with emergency personnel, she returns to her company, where she learns the shocking truth about why her horrible, horrible cat changed color, interviews a new PR employee, and gets in the middle of a minor war between the three alien women and a space cop sent to apprehend them.

Verdict: Thumbs up. There’s a lot of stuff shoehorned in here, some of it a bit weird (Why did Power Girl forget her gloves and boots in the first battle? Was there a plot point behind it?). But there were a lot of cool moments, sometimes very small, sometimes a bit larger. The scene between Power Girl and Pete the fireman is really cute, the alien girls discovering hot dogs is funny, and getting PeeGee’s horrible, horrible cat washed is a small comedy miracle. As always, Amanda Conner’s art makes everything even better.

Hellboy: The Wild Hunt #6

Hellboy and Alice are in the castle of Morgan Le Fay. She tells them about Mordred, the son she bore for King Arthur. Though he died in the Battle of Camlan, and his three sons were killed, he had a daughter who escaped death, and who continued his bloodline through a long line of female children, culminating in a woman named Sarah Hughes, a witch who married a demon, died, and went to Hell to deliver the first male heir in the Pendragon bloodline in hundreds of years — a big, red-skinned guy with a stone hand who likes to file his horns down. In other words, Hellboy is not only the reluctant Beast of the Apocalypse, he’s also the rightful King of Britain. So Morgan gives him a choice — he can take the Sword from the Stone and lead an army of dead elves and fairies into battle, or he can let Nimue, former consort and betrayer of Merlin, destroy the world as the new blood-soaked Queen of the Witches. But Hellboy fears he is slowly becoming the demonic Great Beast — will he end up wearing both crowns at once? Is this just a struggle to decide whether Nimue or Anung un Rama will call an end to creation?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Very big stuff going on here — epic and apocalyptic in every sense of the word. Is Mike Mignola really getting ready to end his own comic-book universe?

The Unwritten #4

Tom Taylor is at his father’s mansion in France, looking for answers to about his disappearance and about all the strangeness plaguing his life. But the assassin Pullman is stalking the writers through the mansion, re-enacting the plots of a few dozen slasher movies — stabbing a couple with a sickle, burning another on an oven, slashing another with glass shards, torturing another while tied to a grandfather clock. And Tom gets left to take the blame for all of it.

Verdict: Thumbs up. A nice little dash of horror-flick terror to go along with the modern literature fantasy — I do love the way Pullman specifically says he’s following the familiar tropes of slasher horror. Tom Taylor sure does keep getting in over his head, don’t he?

Madame Xanadu #14

Our 15th-century flashback this issue focuses on Nimue’s girlfriend being taken and tortued by the Spanish Inquisition. Meanwhile, in the 20th century, Madame Xanadu is on the trail of the deadly supernatural killer, but she needs more information to track him down. So she sneaks into the home of Richard Miller, one of the potential targets, to look for more clues. She soon discovers that Miller is secretly Jewish, but her investigation is interrupted by everyone’s favorite gas-masked Golden Age vigilante, the Sandman. She gives him the slip and uses the artifacts she’s collected to look into the past, where she discovers that the murdered men’s ancestors were all Jews in 15th century Spain — where all religions but Catholicism were illegal. To save themselves and their families, they turned informer, ratting out local Muslims to Torquemada’s enforcers — until a sorcerer sets a demon after them, and they’re all forced to flee — but it appears the demon has finally caught up to them now…

Verdict: Thumbs up. This is still an awfully fun comic, thanks to Matt Wagner’s consistently awesome writing and the absolutely gorgeous artwork by Michael Wm. Kaluta. If you’re into weird but stylish fantasy and horror, you should be picking this up.

The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft #3

H.P. Lovecraft is on the run — after saving Chesser from demonic squamous horrors from beyond our dimension, he’s actually been identified as the attacker. His aunts manage to hide him from the police, but he goes out anyway, intent on convincing his ex-girlfriend Sylvia to leave Providence to escape whatever disaster may be approaching the city. He also goes to a psychiatrist he trusts, hoping he’ll help him stay awake so the monsters won’t re-emerge. But he’s betrayed by the doctor, shot full of morphine, and locked in a cell in the asylum where his mother’s been imprisoned for years. Of course, the doc gets paid back for his treachery by eldritch forces, but that doesn’t improve things for Lovecraft — or for Providence — one bit.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Great suspense and a fun grasp of Lovecraft’s style of cosmic horror. I was expecting Tony Salmons’ impressionistic art style to wear on me by now, but it really does suit the story very well.

The Unwritten #3

Tom Taylor has returned to the castle where he grew up — coincidentally, the same castle where Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein.” As it turns out, there’s a small professionals-only horror symposium taking place there, featuring a half-dozen bad-horror-writer archetypes (Personally, I’m hoping the torture-porn writer gets killed good and hard). The mysterious Elizabeth Hexam is there, too, trying to get Tom to remember what happened to his father the night he disappeared. And as it turns out, Tom realizes that his father hid a safe in the house, figures out the passcode, and finds a couple of strange and seemingly useless items that his dad left for him. Will they be any use against the mystic assassin who’s closing in on Tom?

Verdict: Thumbs up. This really is an excellent series. Lots of fun, lots of mystery, lots of spooky stuff, all tied up in a “Harry Potter” wrapping that makes it all feel familiar and strange at the same time.

The Unwritten #2

Tom Taylor is the son of the vanished Wilson Taylor, who wrote the highly popular Tommy Taylor novels, about a boy wizard’s adventures. Usedta be, everyone thought Wilson Taylor just used his son’s name as a laugh — but now, a lot of people think Tom is the real Tommy Taylor. Tom isn’t happy about this — he liked being able to make money on his close relationship to the novels, but having a lot of crazies who think he’s a messiah isn’t a lot of fun. So he sets out to find out if he’s really Wilson Taylor’s son or if he’s the son of Romanian parents who gave him to Wilson Taylor to use as a prop.

But Tom is definitely down the rabbit hole now. He’s being stalked by a hitman who has the ability to reduce anything to liquified words. He questions his father’s ex-mistress, who gives him a short and very unnerving lesson in magic and the nature of truth and the universe. And a trip to his old family home in Switzerland reveals some very unpleasant memories and an unusual tattoo he’s gotten on his hand. Is Tom Taylor being victimized by a powerful conspiracy? Or is he really a grown-up boy wizard from a fictional universe?

Verdict: Thumbs up. This is developing into an excellent mystery. Tom, with his funny obsession with literary geography, makes an entertaining sleuth, even if he keeps missing the really interesting clues that happen after he’s done questioning someone. The Harry Potter-esque story that goes on in the background of the story is also a lot of fun. And yes, I’m very glad I’m reading this one — it promises a lot of good stuff down the road.

Madame Xanadu #11

New artist Michael William Kaluta has his first issue on this title — the coolest thing about this is that Kaluta helped create Madame Xanadu way back in the ’70s.

Nimue is contacted by a young woman whose father has recently died in a case of spontaneous human combustion. The woman believes her father was murdered, and after a quick reading of her trusty deck of Tarot cards, Madame Xanadu agrees with her. She researches the victim’s life and learns that his last months were dominated by meetings with a man named Husam Al Nar and of being mysteriously stalked by dogs. Combined with this, we get flashbacks to Nimue’s life in Spain in the late 15th century as she and the people she loves must contend with the Spanish Inquisition.

Verdict: An enthusiastic thumbs up. Good gravy, is Kaluta’s artwork beautiful! Very lush, very retro, like some of Charles Dana Gibson‘s work. I was worried that the art would fall off with Amy Reeder Hadley’s departure from the book, but I clearly had nothing to worry about. And Matt Wagner’s story, of course, is no disappointment either — this one is set up much more like a traditional drawing-room mystery, except, obviously, for the inclusion of a number of mysterious occult elements.

The Unwritten #1

Tom Taylor is the son of a best-selling fantasy author who mysteriously vanished after completing his intensely popular series on boy wizard Tommy Taylor. Tom feels conflicted about his fame — after all, it’s tough having the world think of you as the kid who the Tommy Taylor stories were based on. But what’s weird is — there doesn’t seem to be any record of Tom Taylor in his youth. When word gets out, Tommy Taylor fans are divided into two camps — those who want Tom Taylor dead for being a fraud who capitalized on their love of the Tommy Taylor books, and those who want to worship him as the book character brought to life. And when Tom gets kidnapped by someone claiming to be Count Ambrosio, the vampiric villain from the novels, can he manage a storybook ending to escape his own death?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Partly because this one was just a dollar. Just a dollar! These days, that’s just wonderful! And it’s not like you get just a buck’s worth of story — this is 20 smackers’ worth of story. Great characters, great set-up, great plot, and an outstanding mystery. Vertigo offers their first issues for cheap to entice new readers, and it definitely worked on me, ’cause I’m definitely going to pick up the rest of this series.