By Dustin Cabeal
I had some reluctance before picking up Moonhead and the Music Machine. The thing is, I will check out any comic that has some kind of connection to music. Lately, though, there’s been an incredible dry spell for comics and music. I would have to go back to last year to find something good. Apparently good things come in twos with comics because I found not one, but two music-themed comics that were great this week.
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By Dustin Cabeal
I had decided not to review the fifth volume. Hell, I wasn’t even going to read it until I started this volume and saw that there was a character death in the previous volume. It made me think for just a moment that something of importance actually happened.
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By Dustin Cabeal
If there’s one thing most comic readers don’t know about me from reading my reviews, it’s that I love Christmas. No, I’m not, so cliché to follow-up with saying that it’s my favorite time of year, but it is a time in which I love to see the transformation of humanity. In particular, I love things involving Santa Claus and often worry that the lore will be extinct in my lifetime.
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By Dustin Cabeal
Before I read comic books, I read comic strips. To this day I have no idea why the two are considered to be so different to people, to me, they’re both comics. When the “death of print” started and everyone proclaimed newspapers to be on the demise I was mortified. Not because of how many reporters would lose their jobs or how’d we get our weekly ads, but instead because of the comic section. At my house, we had a subscription to the Denver Post just for the comics. I wish that were an exaggeration but my father has never read any other section of the paper and while my mother dabbles, it’s very telling when you start in the comics section and then see what else you paid for, it’s just how we are. The charm of comic strips to me is that it’s daily. Getting just a tiny bit every day of the series you enjoy will always be better than a monthly comic.
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By Dustin Cabeal
If DC had a slogan right now, it would be DC: Bold As Fuck. Seriously, they’re just trying whatever which sounds like a dreadful thing, but it’s not. It’s what the industry has always done, but at some point, the big two were like, Nah, continuity, it’s all about what’s happening in the world. Screw that; I want what ifs and alternate timelines in which Nightwing is a total dick, pun intended. And I don’t need it to be part of the multiverse, just fun comics starring familiar characters for a few months is nice and refreshing.
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By Dustin Cabeal
I’ll save you from the boring “I love Clueless” to speech and just jump right into the question I asked myself the entire time I read the new graphic novel from BOOM! Box/BOOM! Studios…
“Who is this for?”
After reading the entire thing, I can confidently say… I'm clueless, and I wish that were an intended pun, but it’s just the truth.
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By Dustin Cabeal
After my last tongue lashing for this series, I bet you’re wondering why I’m back again? Well, I do like to give things more than one chance because you never know when something could surprise you. That didn’t happen here in case you were wondering. No, unfortunately, it’s just more of the same. Passed on TV scripts being poorly transposed into comic books.
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By Dustin Cabeal
The Hard Place is clearly a story that’s not meant to be judged by the first issue alone. Which makes a review for the first issue all the more difficult to write. Here we are though, and I can only judge what’s here in this first issue.
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By Dustin Cabeal
If you read comics and proclaim to love comics, then you should read Hi-Fi Fight Club this week. If I did a pick of the week or some such crap, then this would be it. If I had a spinner rack at a comic shop with recommendations that people “in the know” scoffed at because they already knew the book was cool, this would be in that spot. I would never know it was in that spot, but it would be there.
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By Dustin Cabeal
This ended up being the second comic about parenting from the male perspective that I’ve read in as many weeks. Fowl Language has some chuckles for sure, but it wasn’t always wildly entertaining.
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By Dustin Cabeal
Having read the previous two books in the Capstone/DC kids books, I decided to give it one more shot because I really would love a kids Batman book that I could share with my son. The same problem persists in Batman is Trustworthy as it did in Be A Star, Wonder Woman and Bedtime for Batman. The message isn’t subtle and the equivalent of me just telling my child to do something while showing them a picture of Batman and saying the word “Batman” over and over.
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By Dustin Cabeal
After a lackluster first issue, I decided to give this series another shot. Unfortunately, it’ll be the last shot I give it. It’s not a bad comic. I’m not quitting it because the story is awful or because the artwork is unenjoyable. It’s just a boring comic book.
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By Dustin Cabeal
If there’s a hotter franchise to come from Japan in the past few years, then I don’t know what it is. I have been approached by so many people regarding One-Punch Man due to the anime, that it shows that it’s transcended just being a manga.
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By Zeb Larson
Southern Bastards is finally back, after a long hiatus. Both Sebastian Girner, the series editor, and Jason Latour lost their fathers within a few weeks of each other, and understandably this pushed back publication of the book. But I’ll be selfish and won’t lie: it’s good, damned good, to finally have this series back. We’re in the middle of several different threads of narrative payoff even as new ones take their place. All of the different factions and people around Boss want him dead, and he’s running out of ways to make himself indispensable to them. For once, his biggest problem isn’t going to be what happens next on the gridiron.
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By Dustin Cabeal
009 - Get ready for something different! This is not the return of the usual Comic Bastards Podcast that you may have been waiting for. Instead, it's something different. It's just me, Dustin, and I'm going to review some books... quickly. Okay, not that quick it turns out, but I will run through about seven or eight titles in what I hope will be a weekly show that I put together. Be sure to check out the video as well... it's me staring at the camera and doodling on the screen... enjoy?
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Press Release
Valiant is proud to announce the NINJA-K #1–4 PRE-ORDER EDITION BUNDLE – available only as a pre-order set to fans who reserve the first four issues of the next EXPLOSIVE ONGOING SERIES in the Valiant “ICONS” line-up! From acclaimed writer Christos Gage (Netflix’s Daredevil) and Valiant superstar Tomas Giorello (X-O MANOWAR), the NINJA-K #1-4 PRE-ORDER EDITION BUNDLE kicks off with a jam-packed 48-page debut and exclusive covers by Eisner Award-nominated artist Tonci Zonjic (Who is Jake Ellis?, Immortal Iron Fist) on each issue – all specifically reserved for fans who pre-order with their local comic shop by the initial order date (IOD) of September 28th, 2017!
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Press Release
This September 19 sees the release of Roman Dirge’s THE BLOODY BEST OF LENORE - a selection of Lenore's funniest and most manically silly adventures collected together for the first time in a special hardcover edition! Celebrating 25 glorious years of Lenore: The Cute little Dead Girl, this fantastic collection comes with a brand-new cover by creator Roman Dirge, and includes a stunning embossed 4-D cover!
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Press Release
Wubba Lubba Dub Dub! Oni Press, Portland’s premier comic book publisher, is proud to announce that Milwaukie, Oregon native Benjamin Dewey (The Autumnlands, I Was The Cat) is bringing his watercolor and illustration talents to the interiors of Rick and Morty™ #30.
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By Oliver Gerlach
Corsair #1, currently on Kickstarter, is an interesting piece of uniquely British horror work, for all the good and all the bad associated with that subgenre. It follows Agent Corsair, a man tasked with investigating the nastier side of the occult. It’s a sound, entertaining premise, with a lot of potential to explore a range of different aspects of both horror and Britain itself.
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By Dustin Cabeal
It has been a long time since I talked about or posted a project that’s either on or coming to a crowd-funded platform. I’ll be honest with you all since I get asked all the time why I stopped (and likely the reason I’m cursed at in private) covering crowd funded projects, and the reason is that there’s just too damn many. I am one dude and to be quite honest the bulk of the requests I was given had no info and nothing for me to see and write about. It’s extremely difficult to help someone when you don’t know anything about their project other than the surface level stuff. It was difficult writing articles worth reading about projects I could hardly talk about. Soon enough, I was getting numerous requests for IndieGoGo/Kickstarter coverage, and it got to the point that I had to decide if I was covering comics or crowd funded projects. I choose comics.
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