Comic Reviews Dustin Cabeal Comic Reviews Dustin Cabeal

Review: Reborn #1

By Dustin Cabeal

After Huck, I came back into the fold on Mark Millar. Before that, I had read and dropped off a lot of Millar titles after the first or second issue. I’ve learned that you have to give him two issues before you heap praise on him, with Huck being the exception.Reborn is vintage Millar. It’s high concept and easy, to sum up. The afterlife is real, but we’re all reborn in different bodies and fighting some fantasy adventure world of good and evil. Like I said, high concept. The charm of the issue comes from the methodical build up that leads to the reveal I just mentioned. We follow a woman’s life as it’s approaching its end and Millar carefully reveals to us each of the characters she’s lost and will once again be united with. It works because Millar is a talented writer and if he would just get over his need to have some kind of ultraviolence, then this issue would have been damn good. His dialogue, in particular, is the closest to the masterful work he did on Huck. I know I’ve brought up Huck way too much, but it is his masterpiece.

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Comic Reviews Robert Larson Comic Reviews Robert Larson

Review: Southern Cross #8

By Robert Larson

Southern Cross doesn’t let up with the second issue of this arc, which is usually where a series slows down for a little bit. But given the crisis that’s unfolding on Romulus, taking things slowly wouldn’t really make all that much sense. Everything was so close to crisis as is, and the disappearance of the Southern Cross and the murder of Carter has make it all fall apart. In the middle of this, Hazel is trying to make sense of it all without getting killed, knowing full well that a murderer is targeting her.

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Comic Reviews Patrick Larose Comic Reviews Patrick Larose

Review: Green Valley #1

By Patrick Larose

Green Valley #1 is everything I hate about reviewing single-issue series. This isn’t even really the fault of the comic itself but instead all the hype and marketing around it. When Green Valley was first announced there was this intense secrecy about it. Every interview following its announcement showed four knights facing off a barbarian horde. They’re friends, this is a fantasy comic it should be straight-forward but the writer, Max Landis, made sure to preface every interview with an “I can’t tell you anything about it without spoiling it.” The tagline itself invites us to question everything that happens in this comic: Kill a wizard, and slay his dragons. But there’s no such thing as wizards, dragons don’t exist.

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Comic Reviews Dustin Cabeal Comic Reviews Dustin Cabeal

Review: Monster of the Week #1

By Dustin Cabeal

For the longest time on the site, we supported Kickstarters and crowdsourced comics in general. After a long while, I noticed that we stopped moving the needle on these projects. There were too many, and our audience either became numb to them or worse, stopped caring about them. Either way, we dropped Kickstarters from the site unless we could review the material. Of course, all this feeds into Monster of the Week which is heading to Kickstarter. The book is finished which is always the best way to bring your comic to Kickstarter, and so the creators sent it my way to check out. I’ll tell you right now: this is the type of book we were always looking to support and help out.

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Comic Reviews Robert Larson Comic Reviews Robert Larson

Review: The Walking Dead #159

By Robert Larson

This is an oddly lifeless issue of The Walking Dead (har har). The battle between the Whisperers and Rick’s people ends in a kind of stalemate, which makes most of the fighting filler for what comes next. Paradoxically, the most interesting moments occur off the battlefield, as there’s a hidden threat in the Kingdom that might derail some of Rick’s plans. But that can’t change the fact that this is a thoroughly middling issue, some filler on the way to something else. Warning: I will be discussing spoilers in this review.

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Comic Reviews Patrick Larose Comic Reviews Patrick Larose

Review: Justice League #6

By Patrick Larose

Dear Justice League #6,  

It’s been quite the trip, huh?

When I found you, it was my first week writing at Comic Bastards. I was at a pretty bad place in my life then. I wasn’t happy or secure in my day job, I was feeling creatively exhausted and drained. I’d been living in Philadelphia for a year and felt as if I hadn’t moved a step from when I came.

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Comic Reviews Wilson Taylor Comic Reviews Wilson Taylor

Review: Croak #2

By Wilson Taylor

I've actually been kind of dreading this review. Out of nowhere the Croak #1 review became my most viewed review on Comic Bastards and perhaps technically my most well-known piece of super-obscure writing. The moment I realized it was getting attention, I began internally begging writer Corey Sousa to knock the rest of the issues out of the park because what I had praised in Croak #1 was its promise of intrigue and I had specifically noted that it was building a particularly fragile house of cards. So how does #2 stand up?

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Comic Reviews Robert Larson Comic Reviews Robert Larson

Review: Autumnlands #13

By Robert Larson

In keeping with the revelations from the last issue, we learn a lot from Autumnlands #13, enough to change our perception of this world. Last issue was about the creators of the Autumnlands, who were really nothing more than irresponsible party boys who used the planet as a kind of pleasure resort. The frat bros made a mess, and now somebody’s been sent to clean it up. But for the residents of the Autumnlands, particularly Dusty and Aelbert, a clean-up crew is not going to be a good thing.

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Comic Reviews Kaleb Hebert Comic Reviews Kaleb Hebert

Review: Evil Ernie: GodEater #3

By Kaleb Herbert

God-Eater is quite the fitting name for the grotesque, gigantic creature that was trapped on Earth and is now free. Through the artwork of Worley and Razek the reader can really get a sense of how immense the God-Eater truly is and how SOL Ernie is in terms of facing off against this monstrosity. Besides the big reveal of exactly who the God Eater creature is this was a rather slow, dreadfully uneventful, somewhat disappointing issue in comparison to how the first two issues went. The first two issues had great character build-up, a solid pacing in terms of events taking place, and this issue just lacked any kind of real motivation to progress the story. From what Jordan and Davidsen delivered previously, maybe there was just a high expectation for them to keep following up with better and better material. Perhaps this slower issue will lead into greater things which is expected from what the past issues have delivered.

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Comic Reviews Robert Larson Comic Reviews Robert Larson

Review: Red One #4

By Robert Larson

I’ve figured out Red One’s schtick. Imagine a hard-core pornographic film that had no sex in it: some initiating dialogue, a premise, but ultimately no payoff. That’s basically this book. It works at a literal level, because Vera keeps talking about sex but never actually having any (though we’re treated to a porno fluffer sequence that ranks up there with the most pointless moments in all of print media); it also works because we keep having this conflict between her and the Carpenter teased, but now the arc is over, and we wait another year for it to be finished. All promise and no payoff.

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