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Review: Blood Stained Teeth #1
By Dustin Cabeal
There’s a lot of vampire books coming out from Image Comics lately. Maybe I’ll like one of them in the future, but Blood Stained Teeth which is a grammar error that I cannot unsee or correct, is not the vampire book for me.
The entire first issue is used to create a situation for the main character to be forced to go through with the plot of the comic. Which does not make it a particularly strong first issue. Especially since it reveals its emotional lynch pin within its pages. You might be wondering to what I’m referring. It’s the plot device that’s been set up with a timer waiting to go off and emotionally manipulated the audience. It’s vampire Pixar moment and it could very well work. Emotional bombs are successful based on the amount of fuse given to them, so if Christian Ward writes a slow burn, it may be successful regardless of the rest of the story.
Review: The Ballad of Ronan #1
By Dustin Cabeal
I’ve never been an orphan, but I cannot imagine that 16 in the age in which you wash out of any orphanage program. If so, we really need to come together with our city leaders and correct this wrong. How do we expect 16-year-olds to go out into the world and support themselves when they’re not even legal adults? And yet our main character has turned 16 and is taking what little money she has to visit her dead mother’s grave and stay at a B&B… after getting a tattoo that she’s not of legal age to get.
Review: Not All Robots #1
By Dustin Cabeal
This is my first comic from AWA. I have little interest in where the company came from and all the backstory. I just know that more comic book companies are a good thing especially as legacy companies continue to be bought by corporate entities. Though I’m fairly certain that AWA is likely owned by a corporation. At any rate, this issue does not make me want to further explore their line of books. That’s fucked up right? Well, that’s how it goes. Every book has the potential to be someone’s first or first book with your company and when you’re a new company every issue potentially decides a reader’s interest in your entire line. That said, I’m not an asshole and will give them further chances, but Not All Robots is a book that I would like to never think about again.
Review: The White Lady
By Dustin Cabeal
Death! It’s coming for us all. Of if it was that easy to sum up The White Lady with just that statement. Instead, we find a complex look at how we care for our elderly. Is there kindness we can provide at the end of one’s life be it a simple gesture of pretending to be someone’s granddaughter after they begin pulling back from them. Quite frankly, I do not think anyone has the answer and there are all sorts of legal gray areas when it comes to end of someone’s life.
Review: The Joneses #1
By Dustin Cabeal
Unfortunately, we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about this cover. What, the holy fuck is going on here? Who thought this photoshopped monstrosity was a good idea and that people would see it on the shelves and want to pick it up and buy it? For starters, the heads don’t match the bodies. The hair for the women are so poorly lasso’d around that it looks tragically bad. What is the dad looking at? What are the children looking at? Why is the mom so goddamn happy to be squatting awkwardly to put those leaves in the bag? I’m not done. Why do they have a wheelbarrow and garbage bags and why do none of the proportions exist on the same planet? Is scale not a thing we can do in photoshop? That wheelbarrow is fucking floating on that grass because it’s sure as shit not interacting with it. Here’s the biggest question, where did all these leaves come from? There’s not a goddamn tree in the yard to produce even a fraction of these leaves. Last one, who buys two different sizes of trash bags? The cover is enough for you to walk away from this issue. It’s front runner for the worst cover I’ve ever seen in my life. I wish that it got better from here, but it doesn’t really.
Review: Ghost Cage #2
By Dustin Cabeal
I wanted to start off with a joke about my interest in this comic being used up like natural resources, but I’m afraid the quality hits too close to home for this comic. Nick Dragotta is a talented artist. I could stare at the pages of this comic all day as they are wonderful. The visuals of the mecha/monster versions of energy resources are still a wonderful idea on paper, but the story execution has delved into predictable and erratic.
Predictable you say? Yes, it was not even remotely a surprise that it was crazy old guy’s daughter. Less surprising was the fact that crazy old guy is alive and looks shittier than his hologram self. I saw Prometheus as well, this isn’t new. It doesn’t have to be new, but the story does very little to make it relevant. We’ve had a handful of panels with the daughter, but I’m supposed to care about her reveal? Why? I don’t. I barely like Doyle and she won’t stop talking so would I care about a daughter character?
Review: The Clay People: Colossus (One-shot)
By Dustin Cabeal
I had no idea that this comic was based on a song. I didn’t know there was a band called The Clay People either. I learned both things at the end of the comic and while it didn’t change anything for me, it may be information that another reader could use before deciding to purchase this one-shot from Top Cow.
I have read this story in different forms, with different lead characters dozens of times. There is something to this story that is searching for an interesting outlet, and I can see the broad appeal to using it. Afterall a clay golem that Jewish people can use for justice/revenge and stems back to World War II feels like a treasure trove of potential stories. Yet, they all pretty much end up like this one-shot.
Review: Yellow Cab
By Dustin Cabeal
Yellow Cab is an interesting read to say the least. I spent the entire story waiting for the other shoe to drop and it never did. Instead, it’s just a look at the complicated nature of driving a cab in New York and how basically it’s a money pit trap for immigrants looking at getting their start in the country.
What’s even more disappointing is that it’s not even a true story, but instead the author of the novel has written themselves into the story to give a fake sense of realism. At least if the concept was based on fact, it would have perhaps been a story to bring up for this one interesting aspect.
Review: Little Monsters #1
By Dustin Cabeal
The concept of eternal children playing capture the flag and tag like the lost boys from Peter Pan is short-lived in this first issue of Little Monsters. It shouldn’t take more than the cover and a few lines of dialogue to figure out that our band of children are all vampires. And though some of them were growing bored of playing childish games, that concept of an empty city inhabited by children playing childish games for hours on end was more intriguing that the rest of the issue.
Review: Is My Brother A Zombie?
By Dustin Cabeal
After asking the question of “Is my brother a zombie?” for thirty-five pages, the story answers the question in two short pages. Leaving me the review to wonder if we really needed thirty-five pages to answer that question. I’m of the opinion of no… no we didn’t.
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The new series is inspired by the Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond’s spy-thriller Secret X-9 newspaper comic strip, which ran for more than 60 years