Hit-Monkey #1-3

One of the best mini Marvel series. This will definitely tug at your heart-strings. A very emotional story of a monkey who was trained to be an assassin, it's a shame that we probably won't see him in any Deadpool movies since they both have some history together. There are hints of animal abuse as well but doesn't go overboard. Bullseye is a perfect villain for him. I enjoyed the flow and intensity of story much more than I thought I would. Especially Hit-Monkey himself, who never talks, but you can always tell what he's conveying through his body language and facial expressions, the artist did a great job on him.

I'd say overall that the Hard Case imprint has been hit or miss.  But I'm glad it's there and I hope it keeps chugging along. 

Not quite modern anymore, but still modern-ish:

Thor, god of Thunder, first hardcover (the god butcher storyline).

Good story by Aaron, great art by Ribic.

These modern Marvel comics are soft reboots, right? Here it is clear that the Ragnarok to end all Ragnaroks (at the end of the original title’s run) never happened, and that Asgard was not destroyed during the Siege storyline... because there are still rooms in Asgard that Thor has never entered, them being reserved for Odin’s use. (They contain booze. Good irreverent gag here).

It’s as if modern X-Men found a secret room in the X-mansion, a room in which Xavier had kept something since before he founded the team.

Those continuity tidbits aside, this is a pretty neat tale, well-served by Ribic’s gorgeous use of his color palette. The ending was a bit conventional but I enjoyed the story a lot.

Well then, transfer my praise to those colorists! Their name should really be more prominent, because they did good!

As I said above, I read the  hardcover collecting that run; its cover gives Aaron, Ribic and Guice as the authors, and mentions no colorist. Now I mean no slight to Guice, who drew one issue in there, but his contribution to the whole thing in no way compares to the work of Svorcina!

For most old comics, color is an added bonus... nice, but not what I would consider an integral part of the art (I even much prefer the art of Colan and Palmer in B&W, in fact). But with many modern comics where the art is digitally painted over pencils, it makes a huge difference. In this particular case, I think it warrants a cover recognition!

But thanks for mentioning Svorcina, whose name I will henceforth associate with this arc. 

Spider-Verse Team-Up # 2 (2014)



I just stumbled upon this issue last week and I'm glad I did.  

The Spider-Man from the classic 1967 cartoon series teams up the Spider-Man from the Ultimate Universe and, I'm guessing a Spider-Man from one of the more recent iterations found on TV.  The story's set in the world of Spider-Man 1967 and while it's pretty brief, I really got a kick out of it.





Multiple universes is more the foray of DC where the purpose of such exercises seems to be convincing newer audiences that the old stuff being referenced is worthless and juvenile while what's being pushed today is, by default, sophisticated and cutting edge .  Here however, Marvel seems to share little, if any, of their competitor's animosity towards its past.  

There are a number of "I swear, every four blocks look exactly the same in this world" jokes directed at Spider-Man '67, but they come from the modern cartoon Spider-Man and not the writer of the piece.  It's hard for me to complain when, first of all, comments such as that and Spidey '67 opining that the new guys "went overboard" with the amount of webs on their outfits are genuinely pretty clever and secondly, in a nice change of pace for this type of story (or perhaps I'm just too familiar with the way DC usually handles these sorts of tales and need to get better acquainted with Marvel) it's the modern version of the character who seems out of touch and out of place when paired up with an earlier doppelganger.

From the opening 'TOO MANY SPIDER-MEN' TV title card used to open the story to J Jonah Jameson being in perfect form as he paranoidly raves about who knows what to appearances of 1967's Green Goblin, Vulture, Electro, Scorpion, and even Dr. Noah Boddy to the way the dialogue demands to be heard in Paul Soles' voice, I really can't get enough of this comic.

My Favorite Things is Mosnters by Emil Ferris, published by Fantagraphics...



Another book I picked up from the library because it appeared on multiple best of lists for 2017. It's a debut graphic novel for Ferris, and the art is unique as it was all produced in ball point pen on notebook paper (and the pages are reproduced to reflect that, ans it is glorious. It is the story of a young girl, Karen, growing up int he tumultuous sixties, who is an outcast and outsider at her Catholic school and identifies more with the monsters she reads about in comics and sees in movies than with other people, and her self-image is as a Larry Talbot-like werewolf girl in mid-transformation. She has lots to deal with, her mothers cancer, the secret her brother is hiding, the murder of her upstairs neighbor who was her closest thing to a friend but swho suffered mental issues stemming form being a holocaust survivor, her love of art, bullies at school, her mafia-connected landlord and his wife who has an unhealthy interest in Karen's brother, and the many people who she encounters in her attempt to solve the murder of her neighbor and uncover her brother's secret. It is a complex, moving, thought-provoking and at times troubling story beautifully rendered by Ferris. It's a meaty book, coming it at close to 400 pages and a dense read, but an engrossing one.

Some sample pages...

Karen as she sees herself...



other pages...





the book is loosely divided into chapters and each chapter starts with a faux monster magazinr cover that hints at the thematic nature of the chapter...



Some of the more engrossing parts revolve around Anka's (the Holocaust-survivor neighbor who was murdered) story, which Karen learns when she discovers a cassette tape recording of Anka discussing her experiences in Germany during the years just before WWII when the Jews were being rounded up and sent to camps and Anka's early life in the brothel where her mother plied her trade.

Some pages from Anka's story...





All in all, an engrossing but disturbing read, well deserving of the accolades it has gotten.

-M