Review: Warp Zone #2

By Ben Boruff

I wonder where Ted Lange IV goes to create Warp Zone. I wonder what the room looks like. The comic's multicolored, eclectic vibe transcends traditional comic book genres, so I imagine that Lange's workspace is equally stimulating. Given the Trekkian vitality of the first two issues of Warp Zone, I picture dark walls and a skylight. I see a poster of 2001: A Space Odyssey behind a sleek, post-modern off-white desk. A number of dog-eared books, including Neuromancer and A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury, rest on the floor. Small canvas prints of various surrealist paintings pepper one side of the room, and a wall-sized copy of Wangechi Mutu’s Funkalicious fruit field covers another. A randomized playlist of Janelle Monáe and Pink Floyd flows from wireless speakers hidden around the room, and glow-in-the-dark stars cover the inside of the door, signaling the arrival of the moon each night. At least that’s what I imagine.

Warp Zone ignores traditional narrative and artistic structures. Like a William Carlos Williams poem, this issue features a great amount of empty space. A few dense panels float in a black abyss, much like the protagonists of Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s space odyssey. The story is an episodic, stop-and-go jumble of comedy and plot—and I love it.

Lange’s Warp Zone is an existentialist tribute to Afrofuturism packaged as a high-concept comic. The protagonist, Mungo, spends much of his time trying to have an authentic reaction to the absurdity that surrounds him, and his journey toward authenticity is both entertaining and frustrating. To claim that Warp Zone #2 is a disorienting cocktail of science fiction comedy—one part Monty Python, one part Osmosis Jones, one part Enter the Void, and two parts The Fifth Element—is to underestimate the comic’s narrative depth. A thematically intriguing drama lives behind Warp Zone’s Mad-esque gimmicks.

Readers who—like Mungo—explore the abyss of multilayered subtext will be rewarded with a new appreciation of hope. “Since I left Earth,” Mungo says, “I’ve learned that hoping and getting are two different things.” Mungo’s acknowledgement of hope reveals Lange’s philosophical and optimistic approach to fantasy. In Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty, science fiction is blended with suburban drama to create a grotesque examination of nihilism. At one point, Morty tells his sister Summer a bleak truth: “Nobody exists on purpose; nobody belongs anywhere; everybody's gonna die. Come watch T.V.” Though Warp Zone’s universe seems similarly chaotic—and at times equally pointless—the comic’s characters remain positive. Unlike Rick and Morty, Lange’s Warp Zone celebrates illogical hope. Mungo is more like James T. Kirk than Rick Sanchez, and Mungo’s recap of the first issue captures the spirit of Enterprise’s five-year mission: “Some time ago, I stumbled into something called a Warp Zone. It’s like a doorway between worlds. Since then, I’ve seen some wild shit.”

My advice: Enjoy the comic’s “wild shit.” And if you’re looking for more meaning, talk to Jack Elsewhere—and join the club.

Score: 4/5

Warp Zone #2
Writer/Artist: Ted Lange IV
Publisher: Rosarium Publishing

Review: Trinity #1

In writing there’s a principle known as the Power of Three or Rule of Three: it affirms that in literature things are funnier, scarier, more exciting, effective, etc. when they are grouped in a triad. It might sound silly at first, but once you start thinking of examples it’s hard to argue otherwise: Three Little Pigs, Three Musketeers, there’s even three ghosts of Christmas! Imagine someone said to you “hey, do you want one scoop of ice cream or would you like three?” you’re probably not going to have to think very hard about your response. So, with that logic in mind, a comic that prominently features three characters from the DCU that I love most, by definition alone should be amazing – right? Wrong, wrong, wrong. Though the title of the book is Trinity, you could easily have called this issue Superman #1.5. The scene opens on the Kent farm where young Jon Kent is still learning to control his burgeoning powers, a pre-New 52 Superman is finishing his patrol, and a now domesticated Lois Lane is preparing a dinner party for a couple of heroic guests (familiar, no?). Suffice it to say things get off to a bit of a rocky start: before Bruce and Diana can even cross the threshold, Jon nearly obliterates both them trying to use his x-ray vision. The dinner topic of conversation is no less precarious as Bruce is quick to remind Clark of how little he trusts him and that unchecked, he and Jon are two of the most dangerous beings on the entire planet. Tensions subside after the meal: Lois and Diana are left to talk alone while Clark and Bruce put Jon to bed. The strength of old ties helps to quell new rivalries/suspicions and a loose "friendship" is formed, albeit hesitantly. The resolve it fosters, however, is short-lived; a voice begins calling out to Clark, beckoning him forward towards the barn. Once inside, the triad of heroes discovers a relic straight from the pages of J.K. Rowling or C.S. Lewis: a literal mirror into Superman's past!

I feel very conflicted over this issue. It isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination; in fact, I actually enjoyed the writing for the most part. The narrative helped with the overall flow of the story, and Manapul does an unparalleled job of getting in touch with the human side of the characters, however at times this also becomes the book’s greatest flaw. Notice how in my above description I said Bruce, not Batman; Diana not Wonder Woman? That wasn’t by accident: Manapul focuses so much on the human relationship that we lose the super-human element almost entirely; we don’t even see Batman or Wonder Woman in uniform, save for one page. It’s a mending-the-fences type issue that reads at times like a bottle-neck episode of daytime t.v. I understand that Manapul has to build the story up and is walking a fine line between canon/non-canon continuity, occupying the space in between; I was just expecting more of a bang and less of a whimper. Oh, and Superman’s whole Mirror of Erised moment – no, not a fan.

The art is certainly good enough; it is Francis Manapul after all - duh. The layouts are impressive, but I would be lying if I said it was the best Manapul I’d ever seen. There’s just simply not the same amount of detail in his lines that fans of his past work are used to seeing. As a colourist, however, he leaves an entirely different impression; and it’s beautiful. A farm might not make for the most exciting of settings, but it does lend itself nicely to some breathtaking sunsets and scenery. Manapul’s ability to showcase beauty through something as inconsequential as light escaping through a farm house door is what makes him the talented artist he is, and it also helps to pick the reader up in those moments when the script falters.

Even as I write this review, I’m still asking myself how I felt about Trinity as a whole. It was slow paced, but there was definite substance and character depth well beyond the scope of what you normally see in superhero comics. On the other hand, it IS a superhero comic! Would it have hurt to see the Justice League’s most famous members do something, anything that was even kind of cool in their first issue?! I think we all would have been O.K. with that; I definitely would have been. I’ll keep reading on not because of what Trinity is but rather because of what I think/hope it will become; I just hope I’m right.

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Trinity #1 Writer/Artist/Colourist: Francis Manapul Publisher: DC Comics Price: $2.99 Format: Ongoing; Print/Digital

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Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #62

Dear Comic Bastards, It is with a heavy heart that I must resign from reviewing Turtles comics.

I do this for fun, you see, because a wide array of varying media contributes very heavily to one's critical spectrum. To find out what works and what doesn't work in storytelling, one must seek every avenue, must look to both good and bad and find out which pieces make the machine go and which make it stop in its track.

I'm done reviewing TMNT comics because I've learned everything that I can from them, namely boiling down to two separate things: Variety is, as ever, the spice of life; and you cannot escape one's origins. The best parts of the Turtles have never been its direct origins, the original comics were equal parts goofy in that they were a shockingly violent parody of Daredevil, and uncomfortable in that they weren't... particularly good.

The Turtles lineage, even as a cartoon, has always been soaked in its original parody-origins; the Turtles were never Batman in ever sense of the term: did not have the moral fiber, did not have the obsessive streak, did not have a stick up their collective turtle butts and they weren't quite as skilled as a man who's entire claim to legacy is being good at literally everything.

Whether you were laughing at the joke or laughing at the fact that the Turtles themselves act in fun, humorous ways, they always had a levity to them in a Deadpool sort of way that refused to conform to average comic stories. The fact that it was four turtles raised by a rat and in the ways of ninjitsu to fight a ninja clan leader and his mutated rhino and warthog lackeys was supposed to mean that, due to circumstance, the Turtles couldn't fall prey to feeling like every other goddamned comic.

Lo and behold, though, the clowns have all been shoo'd away, Shredder's gone, the main villain is Kitsune, an ancient Japanese god and the conflict revolves, in this issue, a human being kidnapped and Mikey coming back to his family after having left not even two issues ago.

Characters like Baxter Stockman, the Rat King, Shredder, Bebop, Rocksteady and even new addition Old Hob are now revealed to not only have been great additions but, in reality, necessary to the Turtles universe. The turtles themselves can be corrupted by samey continuity-tying comic nonsense, the same kind you see in Average Evil-Fighter Issue #596. When the turtles' main enemy is both a boring Japanese god and their own inner conflict and nothing else, there is no situational barrier keeping the turtles being as boring as their writer is.

Is this particular issue bad? It's the same as the last thousand, little moves, character relationships are reinforced so if the last couple of issues were bad then you'd better damn well be sure that this issue's bad too. I would take any version of the turtles over this because every single version tried something new and untested, even the bad ones. The third Turtles movie brought them to Feudal Japan. Bad, but interesting. The CG Turtles movie put the Turtles inner conflict at front and center, with the bad guy being the side story for a change. Kind bad, but interesting. The New Mutation added a girl turtle. REALLY bad but it wasn't stale, Goddammit. Splinter being the head of the foot clan doesn't change anything for the story, it's incidental! This changes nothing for the minute to minute of how the Turtles comics read!

I should give this one a one out of five but it doesn't deserve it because the level of effort here is same consistent level it's been keeping for months. It's not Turtles that's changed, it's my growing annoyance with it.

Someone hit me up on Twitter if it starts getting interested again. Find me at @MrFistSalad. While I'm at it with the self-promotion, check out The Dolridge Sacrament, published by Alterna Comics! Give your money to me and not this goddamn Turtles comic. Or go get a burger with that money.

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #62 Writer: Tom Waltz Artist: Dave Wachter Publisher: IDW Publishing Price: $3.99 Format: Ongoing; Print/Digital

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Rom Spaceknight

It was a comic that was weird, inspiring and human and one that when I first read it, compelled me to hide it behind a bookshelf in disgust. Rom came down from outer space to save us all, and in 1979 this strange silver cyborg transformed what could have been a cheap, forgettable marketing ploy into an enduring folk hero within comic’s history. It told a story about war and what it meant to serve in a way only possible through the pathos of superhero storytelling. Rom’s story begins as one of desperation—both on the page and in the real world. The Parker Brothers, known for their board games like Monopoly and Clue, wanted to break into the toy industry but they wanted to do this as cheaply as they possibly could.

They started by buying a patent for a toy named COBOL—a robot with new and inventive internal electronics that caused its eyes to glow an eerie green. They renamed this robot ROM, downgraded those green eyes to red and gave it only three points of articulation. ROM was an ugly, clunky gray monstrosity—a toy that was a preordained to fail and be forgotten within a year of its release by degrees of sheer mediocrity.

This prophecy would have gone to self-fulfilling if not one for one writer who saw something no one else did.

Bill Mantlo was no reader’s favorite writer at Marvel Comics, but that was okay. Mantlo was a workman’s writer, someone who flourished under deadlines and became known internally as “the Fill-in King.” He was the guy relied on to quickly create stories for series when their own writers fell behind schedule. He would deliver despite being given short notice, little development time, and even less recognition. In spite of all that work and success, Mantlo was never given a full series of his own.

That is until one Christmas morning. He was spending the day with his family. They had just opened presents and Mantlo watched his son play with these new action figures—these strange and colorful robots—it was in that moment he experienced something akin to that primal imagination we tap into as children playing with our toys. He looked at these plastic figures and suddenly he knew. He saw their histories, characters and saw a story in them needing to be told.

He rushed down to Jim Shooter, Marvel’s editor-in-chief, and convinced him that Marvel needed to license these products—they had to turn these into comics.

When Bill Mantlo started writing Rom Spaceknight, the original product had no backstory. There were no other characters in the line, not even any villains. Alone, Mantlo created a story about a man from the far-off utopian planet of Galador who sacrificed his life and humanity in order to combat the invading, tyrannical and shapeshifting force known as the Dire Wraiths. He created a story about a war between magic and science—about a war experience that encompassed two hundred years of an artificially extended life with that conflict now brought to Earth.

The comic series Rom Spaceknight was a fantastical, bombastic experience with stories that in part was driven by its pulp adventure elements—this was a world that might introduce an underground army of lizard guerilla soldiers, living houses and other dimensions. They pushed the boundaries of reality and reworked Marvel’s forgotten characters in new and more human ways. This cracked open the comic universe making it feel more expansive than people with accidental powers punching other people with accidental powers.

Mantlo accomplished this at least in part by tapping into this malleable sense of imagination that touches that experience we all have as kids coming up with stories in our crayon drawing and Lego buildings. Rom talks like a child’s idea of a hero through this grandiose and archaic speechifying. The Spaceknights, the Galadorian band of cybernetic warriors, look like they came from a drawing on the fridge. They each have designs based on basic shapes—some have square heads and bodies, others more hexagonal—with each defined with a primary color and a unique power that sounds something coming off a playground. Rom is really strong, another Spaceknight has fire powers, while another with light or dark powers. They’re vague but still simple. There are no proposed pseudoscience or outline limitations with these characters and they’re presented without a hint of self-awareness or pretentiousness.

These designs are driven by a type of visual purity and simplicity that, I think, invoke a mental space for us to enter: these stories were weird, the characters fantastical but at its core was why we came to superhero stories in the first place.

When I first encountered Rom it was forty years after his debut in 2009. I was a teenager still getting into comics but I’d never been to a comic book store. I’d read the hardcover and trades of Watchmen and Sandman but I’d never flipped through the leaf-thin pages of a single issue. This might sound insignificant but comics are nothing if built on tradition—characters have a legacy, writers and artists have legacies, and if the comics we love become our Bibles for understanding morals and empathy, then the comic book store is the church.

So one summer day my older cousin took us the forty minute drive to the nearest mall and into this small little boutique comic shop with barely enough space to walk. They didn’t carry trades; they didn’t even carry anything current—what they had instead were rows and rows of long boxes. These unmarked cardboard crates stacked on folding tables and filled with hundreds and hundreds of individual comics. Where, almost like a pew, you bent over and performed that sacred act of divination of finding the one issue you were meant to find. I went in looking for something by Alan Moore or maybe Grant Morrison but what I found instead was Rom Spaceknight #5.

I bought it as a joke—one of those teenage irony jokes. The cover said this was a Marvel comic but with a character I’d never seen before: this goofy silver robot with metal mitten hands spread apart by orange tentacles of smoke while household furniture smashed against his body and a couple cowered in the corner. There was a war of confusing aesthetics taking place. Was this science fiction? Was this a horror story? Was this Marvel's version of SummerSlam?

What was unknown to me at the time was how close my first impression captured a big part of what made Rom Spaceknight work—a thing appeared to be a goofy and a bad idea used this specific visual expectation to sneak in weighty realities.

A superhero comic isn’t bound by the visual limitations of a movie’s special effects budget and neither are they bound by the reader’s suspension of disbelief as with a book. What happens in here is limited only by what’s on the page and what’s on that page can be anything. They are a unique opportunity where the stories can mix genres, mix subject matters, tones, character archetypes and settings. A story can have an alien invasion battled off by a magical sorcerer living in Greenwich Village, men can fly, women can turn invisible and people came come back from the dead all within the same set of pages. The stories are fantastical, surreal and present a type of consistent, exciting strangeness that other mediums can never risk matching. Our brains buy into these stories because we can see it for ourselves across the page.

As much as this is a strength for the superhero story, it’s also their greatest weakness. The stories often stray too far from common sense logic and lean too heavily into a spectacle. They ultimately risk becoming inhuman but when they work, it’s almost always because they balance this flimsy unreality with very real-feeling characters and situations.

In that issue #5 of Rom Spaceknight I bought seven years ago, begins with Rom and his two human sidekicks hiding from the local police and military. These groups have been infiltrated by the Dire Wraiths and they lead these efforts using magic hounds without eyes to find them out. Rom and his friends take shelter in an abandoned home, only to discover the home itself is a living entity that has grown stronger by feasting on the Dire Wraiths and their magic.

The story is convoluted and frankly overwritten. Dialogue and caption boxes overcrowd on every page and the colors have already run together and faded. Yet there’s a moment between the strange, pulp movements of the superhero story that gives way to an absolute humanity. We get a flashback of Rom before the war and before he gave up his human body. He’s in an argument with his girlfriend, she just learned he’s volunteered to go to war, to enlist in the Spaceknight program and she’s afraid. She pleads with him not to go—that with so many people already volunteered why does he still have to do it? Why leave her? Rom is a man of values but he admits he’s scared too and that fear is exactly why he has to leave. He assures her, however, that he’ll return and that their love will outlast the war they’ve been drawn into.

Only that memory was two hundred years and staring at the couple he’s befriended (awkward wording), seeing them hold each other for comfort, he knows what he told her was a lie. War has guaranteed that their love could only have ever died.

For superhero stories, the baseline reality is a type of hyper-reality so when the writer taps into real human moments, human realities and situations, these pieces of writing stand out and stick with us. The unreality almost elevates the impact for when real and relatable things happen. This is the reason a kid from Queens is so many people’s favorite character despite constantly swinging between skyscrapers and dating super models. There’s a spark wherein we see ourselves and through that lens believe we ourselves can be so much better. It’s the dance of the relatable nestled inside the un-relatable—the idea that there’s something very real inside this insane situation and this is a big part of why Rom Spaceknight works. 

After I first finished reading that issue, I was embarrassed at my own joke. I hid the comic somewhere in my bedroom bookshelf and for a long time pushed that story further away in my memory. I wasn’t an immediate fan of Rom and I wouldn’t even see him again until years later when I was in college. By then I’d gotten deep into retro comic book art—all the masterworks of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko—and following as many of these dedicated blogs I could find on Tumblr. That’s when they started posting covers of Rom Spaceknight.

There was a moment of instant recognition, that unearthing of old memories about a clunky robot that fought shapeshifting wizards from another world. When I started scrolling through them my roommate came in and immediately sounded off: “Holy shit is that Rom?”

When he was a kid his dad had a mountain of a comic collection. Stacks and stacks of single issues that spanned decades and companies and out of all of them he remembered this one issue of Rom Spaceknight in a sea of infinitely more survivable titles. His dad didn’t even remember the series, remember the character or even buying the issue but despite all that, the art and characters of Rom stuck with him.

We talked about what we remembered from the issues we’d read and how it was strange retro art and the contradictions in the character that stuck out most. Rom was a character, he described to me, who was very alien while having the personality of an orthodox superhero. A character whose internal monologs had all the emotions and motivations of a stand-up guy with powers but wasn’t a guy at all but a cybernetic war machine designed solely for xenocide.

That conversation launched me into seeking out and reading the entirety of Rom Spaceknight. It was here that I discovered Rom was a series built and succeeded by its contradictions.

Rom was a series licensed to sell a product but had little to do with that actual product. A series owned by a toy company but one Marvel fully incorporated into their world. Rom interacted with the X-Men, the Avengers, and the Fantastic Four. Marvel heroes became retconned into making more sense with Rom’s world and where Rom had meaningful interactions with Marvel’s superheroes (Rom is even responsible for Rogue becoming a good guy).

These stories are meant to go forever—to constantly be reinvented and rebooted with new #1s—but Rom Spaceknight ran for seventy-five issues and ended. A series that made the world feel big with limitless possibilities yet for so many issues was restrained to a small town in West Virginia.

What should have been a fluke, a cheap piece of merchandising became a story filled with imaginative situations balanced with intricately written characters and themes.

My roommate was right. Rom had the personality of a typical superhero. He believes in empathy, he believes in never killing even though his mission is to effectively snuff out an entire race. In theory, he was that contradictory image of Full Metal Jacket—the soldier helmet with a peace sign next to the words “Born to Kill.” Yet the further the series expands, the more the story grows and details are given a purpose. Rom sticks with his morals and compassion because they’re the only things that keep him human. It’s revealed that he’s seen other Spaceknights lose themselves in death and in turn lose whatever sense of humanity they had left. Rom lives with that fear and that reality where the longer he stays inside this body of a war machine, the closer he inches toward becoming solely that juggernaut of death.

The more I read the series, the more I’d tell my former roommate about the stories inside—about the Dire Wraith who deserted the war and started a human family, about when Rom tricked Galactus into eating the Dire Wraith home planets and how the final villain turned out not to be the Dire Wraiths but Spaceknights corrupted by their power of war.

There was never an issue that didn’t have an interesting story beat or fantastical turn inside yet while that makes every issue something to look at, Rom Spaceknight only works as a story taken by its whole—the development of character, the enrichment of themes and a finality for the series.

Rom was only ever a licensed product and when that license ran out, Marvel lost all rights to the character. Rom would never appear in another story. Marvel could never reprint the issues and sell a collection. The survival of Rom Spaceknight lives on only by the ability of those that remember and talk about Rom.

Over the past few years, especially since the relaunch of Rom at IDW Publishing, more and more writers have come out and talked the praises of Rom—praises for the character, setting and the series—and that’s brought questions of why? Rom was a clunky, dumb looking, generic science fiction story from the 80s, why should anyone care about him?

I think what it comes down to is that when a story gets told—that is the story. Yet when someone retells that story it becomes something different, something elevated by our opinions and our experience of first reading and engaging with that story.

We tweak the details we liked, represent the parts we found most interesting sometimes in spite of how they were originally laid out. Through that, I think the readers and fans of Rom Spaceknight have turned him into a comic book folk hero.

You can’t easily access these issues I’ve talked about and neither can you easily experience the totality of this series, but you can listen to me talk about it. I’ll tell you about the story of a man who sacrificed himself to protect his country and fought every day of his life to retain that humanity he could have so easily lost. A story about the often cyclic nature of violence but most important a story about a lone knight from a faraway land who came to save everyone.

Review: Nightlights

By Dustin Cabeal

Previously I have talked about Nightlights on our podcast the CBMFP (here). One of the few reasons I don’t like talking about a book on the podcast before writing the review is that I tend to put it off. Point in case here. Something about getting most of the thoughts out of my head before writing makes the return time on the thoughts longer. Which hopefully the visual you just got was clouds of my thoughts shooting out and then slowly returning because that’s a perfect visual for this story.Nightlights follows the story of a little girl named Sandy and while I could give you a synopsis of the story I’m not going to. Instead, I’m just going to tell you what I think this story is about because on the surface it looks like an all-ages book, but it’s anything but.

Nightlights deals with the complex relationship between the creator and the fan. Sandy befriends another little girl that’s a demon of sorts and feeds off her creations. A metaphor for the fan/creator relationship in that demon tells Sandy that “no one will appreciate her work or love it as much as she does.” Something I imagine a lot of artists/creators fear all the time. That is what I got from the story, and it’s all hidden within this almost intentionally vague story about a little girl finding her confidence and fighting off negativity in her life.

With it comes some of the best visuals I’ve seen all year. Creator Lorena Alvarez has a style that’s part Disney, part classic European storybooks and part Hayao Miyazaki. If that sounds fantastic to you, it should. It is fantastic, and I could soak in Alvarez’s artwork all day. Truth be told, I went back and just looked at the visuals after finishing my first read of Nightlights.

I have to point out that it’s not just the linework, the soft features and child’s storybook look of the art, but the coloring. The coloring is some of the most vibrant I’ve ever seen. It’s rich and deep with variations and detail making both worlds come to life in a way only your imagination can. Alvarez colors the way I see things in my head, and that is a rarity to have happen.

Nightlights came at a time when I was really down on the comic industry. I had gone weeks and weeks without reading anything that was any good. At least good and new. I hope that Alvarez has something else in the works because I fell in love with Nightlights. I would highly recommend it to anyone that loves the comic medium or if you’re interested in the complex relationship between the creator and the fan.

Score: 5/5

Nightlights
Creator: Lorena Alvarez
Publisher: Nobrow Press
Price: $18.95
Format: Hardcover; Print

Review: One-Punch Man vol. 9

One-Punch Man continues to be fucking brilliant. Depending on your genre preference, I don’t think there’s a better manga out there. In my last review, I mentioned that writer One was threading storylines and at that moment there were still a few options as to where the story could go. We get the answer to that question in this volume, but I think it’s more complex than it seems. To explain, I said that he was laying the groundwork for several storylines that would continue to play out over the course of the series, but now I may be wrong. I think that One might be threading all of these stories into one overall arc and that they’ll tie together in the near future.

Point in case the story picks up with Garo, the former top student of the old dude that’s always trying to recruit Saitama and Genos. He beats up and or kills everyone at the villain meeting and leaves to get stronger to face King. Who we know is a fraud that’s been living off of Saitama’s feats. Speaking of which they’re friends now and play video games against each other, though there’s no hint about King’s choice of either revealing himself or getting stronger.

The story then takes some time to introduce Tornado’s older sister who rules the B-Class as she comes to get Saitama to join her gang of heroes or to beat him up. You can imagine how this goes. Actually, you can’t because it’s way better and funnier than anything I imagined.

There’s plenty more to read and enjoy, but it’s clear that One is just getting started with this story arc. It doesn’t feel like typical shonen in that it’s drawn out to fill pages, but rather the story is just that damn big. The characters being introduced feel as if they have a purpose that’s yet to be revealed to us. One also manages to make you concerned about Genos, if you weren’t already. We’ll see how it turns out obviously, but he’s getting further and further from the character we first meet.

Not surprising, the artwork from Yusuke Murata continues to be something greater than fantastic. Whatever that is, he’s it. His work is incredible. He stays true to the style that manga is known for, but you can tell that he’s so talented that he could take on any style he wanted. In some ways, he reminds me of Jose Juan Ryp’s artwork in that it’s incredibly detailed and enjoyable because of the detail. Murata has an advantage of Ryp in that he’s a better visual storyteller and able to mix humor into his artwork.

The last thing I will say about this volume is that you get to learn what Genos and Saitama’s official hero names are… I won’t spoil it for you, but it is probably one of the best things in this volume.

If you’re not reading One-Punch Man, and you enjoy either A) comics, B) manga because you can’t just acknowledge that comics are comics, then you are missing out on the best superhero story being published at the moment. Marvel and DC wish they could produce something this fantastic and the kicker is that it’s a shared universe all within one series. It’s going to be a long wait until volume 10.

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One-Punch Man vol. 9 Writer: One Artist: Yusuke Murata Publisher: Viz Media Price: $9.99 Format: TPB; Print/Digital

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Review: Twin Star Exorcists vol. 6

Twin Star Exorcists manages to follow the shonen storytelling style, while also breaking a lot of the norms. When a story starts off following middle schoolers, you rarely expect it to jump ahead to high school by the sixth volume. Especially given the intense events of the previous five volumes. That’s what happens here, though, as the story jumps to high school and two years later with Rokuro and Benio having completed their training to go the island and now just waiting to be tested. Let me repeat that because I want it to be clear how different this is from typical shonen; the story actually chose to skip two years of training to get to the point. I’ve never read a story in which the creator passed up showing people training over and over. Sure, there’s some training shown in this volume, but it’s a part of the story rather than the focus of the story.

Where it stays faithful to the form is the harem element. We started off with the obvious childhood friendship angle between Mayura and Rokuro; then Benio, in fact, fell in love with Rokuro, and he might have feelings for her as well, but he’s an idiot in that area so of course, he can’t see either woman’s interest in him. Now with this volume, we add a female character that’s head over heels in love with him and very open about it. Before we get to that, let’s talk about the volume leading up to this.

The opening establishes that Rokuro and Benio are complete and total badasses now. It’s a quick opening, and we even check in with Mayura which I find to be a pointless aspect of the story now. Unless they have some trick up their sleeve for her, it would be better to move the story forward without her. After the opening, Rokuro is tested by Shimon Ikaruga who saved him and Benio in the last book. He hates Rokuro because of how formal he talks to people and for the fact that Seigen left him to train Rokuro. The battle is decent, and we do see how Rokuro has improved, but he still loses, and it leaves you as the reader wondering if he could really handle the island.

Ikaruga’s test wasn’t the real test, though. His was a strange, probably made up, pre-test. The real test isn’t even a fight. It’s a girl with extraordinary spiritual power that taps into your spiritual power to see if you have what it takes. Enter Chiko, who is of some relation to Ikaruga. Chiko’s never left the island because of how powerful she is and while we learn that she’s been very sheltered suddenly she’s allowed to dismiss her bodyguards and walk around on her own which goes against her character development later on. Rokuro is her hero because he unwittingly gave her a reason to leave the island, but the test… well, the test ends on a cliffhanger, and only Benio and the reader know why the test is a bad idea.

Other than all the time wasted with Chiko, this is a great volume. I wish it didn’t have so much harem elements, this time, around, but it does due to the genre. There is some good ecchi moments at the end between Benio and Rokuro and it just really shows why that’s the only relationship that the story should focus on. The rest is just page clutter. The point of the story isn’t “who will Rokuro pick,” but rather, will he and Benio do what they set out to do or will they need to have a kid to finish the job? That’s the focus, and so when it loses that focus, it’s frustrating. Thankfully the bulk of the book is spent in battle and with actual character development.

The artwork is impressive given the fact that seven people are now working on this title. It’s getting to the point that I don’t think it’s going to be allowed to fail, but as long as it continues being this damn good, I don’t mind. I would like to pretend that you’ve read my previous reviews for the series and remember what I said so that I don’t have to retype my feelings about the art here, but that would be foolish of me.

It follows the standard layouts, lots of panels intersected at angles which in a way breaks the flow of the action, but something about it works rather well here. It doesn’t feel as standard, but rather the creator and assistants are using it to further the action. The details are of course great and maintained throughout. I still really enjoy the blank bubble looking characters that are used with the story is humorous. A big standout in the art is the facial expressions and a number of default expressions there are. Everyone has a natural default face that doesn’t stem from a genre trope.

I was looking forward to this volume a lot, and I wasn’t let down. Watching the release schedule, though, I don’t think we’ll be seeing another volume until next year which sucks because I want to read it right now, but also for the best so that I’m never so caught up that I have to pick up the weekly Shonen Jump issues to read along. Having given up on the anime after three or four episodes, I can’t say if it’s in line with the anime. From what I saw of it and from reading all the volumes, I would say stick with the manga. It’s one of the best of its genre.

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Twin Star Exorcists vol. 6 Writer: Yoshiaki Sukeno Artists: Yoshiaki Sukeno, Erubo Hijihara, koppy, Tomohiro Fukuoka, Takumi Kikuta, Testuro Kakiuchi Publisher: Viz Media Price: $9.99 Format: TPB; Print/Digital

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