Archive for the 'Vertigo Comics' Category

18
May

Faker #01 (of 6)

This column mentioned one of the previous days the forthcoming comic book “God Save the Queen” by Mike Carey and was actually thrilled to present a new work by him. This is the second time in a short period that we enjoy that privilege, Carey’s new mini series will be released this July by Vertigo and is titled Faker, it also seems capable of rocking your world (I know, I can’t control my enthusiasm).

Jessie is reaching the end of his freshman year in University in a tough Minnesota winter and to celebrate it he and his friends plan a great, wild party. After the party though everything seems to go terribly wrong for everyone, Jessie is hunted by memories she avoided for years, her best friend seems to have lost his identity and nobody outside their circle remembers or recognizes him with every official record of his existence deleted. What begins as a joke soon becomes a horror story where someone is something else than what he showed to his friends.

Faker is written by the great Mike Carey (Lucifer, Crossing Midnight, God Save the Queen) and illustrated by also well known Jock (he made The Losers, a great action story about a missing black-ops military team betrayed by their own bosses which is also planned to become a movie). It’s a story taking place the first year of its heroes’ independent lives when they choose what they want to be and what they want to pretend they are. All that through the prism of Carey’s story telling charisma and Jock’s beautiful drawing, this is something you can’t miss!

7709_400×600.jpg

12
May

Jack of Fables #10

normal_jof-diptych2.jpg

There are several different opinions on who’s the most popular character in Vertigo’s acclaimed series Fables but the creators decided to create a spin-off series about Jack, the trickster, thieving, attractive guy that got banished after the discovery of his actions back in the main series. Jack is an anti-hero, he’s cynical, street smart, basically good but only when it fits him right. So what’s special about his own series?

Actually not much. I started reading this out of hope that it might approach the success of Fables but the first issues were kind of disappointing, Jack roaming the streets on his own gets kidnapped by a mad collector of Fable characters and manages to escape after a series of quite predictable events. The interesting part is that as the story continues it seems to obtain a style of its own, interestingly humorous with grasping story telling. In this issue Jack being recently widowed seems unable to do anything right, his fortune is lost, lady Luck hunts him and Mister Revise with his librarians finally track him down.

Another interesting fact about issue 10 of Jack of Fables is that the creators mistakenly deleted a dialogue box in page 10, it’s not such a big deal but it might add collective value to it. The official announcement of the creative team:

Dear Readers–

We goofed.

During the production and printing phase of Jack of Fables #10, the dialog on page ten was accidentally omitted. We present here, in Sneak Peek form, the corrected page with the dialog in place. If you are very enterprising, feel free to download the Sneak Peek, print it out, and paste this into your copy of Jack #10. Or you can wait for the trade paperback, wherein the mistake will be corrected.

We apologize for the error.

-The Jack of Fables Team
7228_400×600.jpg

07
May

100 Bullets #84

Your favorite Vertigo series is back and the synopsis of the July issue is released! Marching towards the last 15 issues 100 Bullets becomes more thrilling than ever, the plot is finally being revealed step by step and the dark characters of Azarello’s and Risso’s noir vision approach the grand finale. What really happened in Atlantic City? What’s agent Graves’ secret agenda? What will be Dizzy Cordova’s fate and what about the rest of the Minutemen? Well, in a little more than a year there will be no secrets left so enjoy it while it lasts!

After the events of #81-83 in Rome the story shifts to two other heroes, the Minutemen Victor Ray and Remi Rome, the description in the official site of Vertigo is the following:
“Minutemen Victor Ray and Remi Rome are in need of a vacation, so they head to scenic
Lake Tahoe for some R and R with the beautiful people. But you know what they say — “All play and no work make The Minutemen dull boys…””

So is this going to be a revealing issue about the facts of the past through a seemingly indifferent event or a break between two big story turns? There have been quite a few of both in the past 83 issues so any bet is not safe, but really who cares? This is one of the best written comics ever made, a masterpiece of narrative coming to a peak, are you really going to ignore it?

7365_400×600.jpg

20
Apr

God Save the Queen

If you liked Books of Magic, The Sandman, Wisdom or any other comic title presenting the Fairy and its odd inhabitants you might have heard of the upcoming release of Vertigo’s new hard-cover title, God Save the Queen. Well I don’t know what you’ve heard but this one’s a bit different than what we’ve encountered before:

The story is set in modern London where a bored, rebellious teenager, Linda, starts hanging out with a group of wild fairies. They introduce her to the ultimate fairy drug, Red Horse, a mixture of heroin and human blood and quite the dangerous high, and she soon finds herself drawn in a civil war from the alleys of London to the fields of Fairy, a fight between Queen Titania and her mad predecessor Queen Mab. A grasping story with cameo appearances of other Vertigo characters, what more would you ask?

The story seems extremely interesting of course but the element that captured mostly my attention was the creator team. Written by Mike Carey (Hellblazer, Crossing Midnight, Lucifer) and illustrated by John Bolton (the person who first designed Tim Hunter’s face in the Books of Magic, he has a strong resemblance to his older brother) this could be nothing less than a masterpiece, both of them carry along a big piece of recent comics history. Especially Carey, a living legend in comic narrating, is a creator whose work I try to follow closely, check out for instance the recent issue 229 of Hellblazer, a beautiful story about why you should never do a friend a favor. Now, if this one’s going to be as good as their previous books, I don’t know but the clues point that way, you can bet I’ll buy it the moment it’s released though (that would be April the 25th). Punk/fairy is here to stay (cool name for a new gender)!

6628_400×600.jpg

19
Apr

The Sandman – The Endless

As a tribute to the greatest comic ever made today’s column will be a presentation of the Endless, the 7 members of the greatest family ever written about (ok, I’ll try to chill out). Less talk and more pictures, these are the Endless:

Destiny: The elder brother of this family Destiny is appeared as an old man dressed in brown robes with a book chained on his hand (or him chained to it). He is walking in his garden, a vast maze in which when you walk forward there are countless different ways but when you look back only one path exists, reading the book where everything that happened, happens or ever will happen is written.

destinysandman.JPG

Despair: A short, fat, grey woman who rarely speaks, she wears a hooked ring (her emblem) which she uses to carve herself. She lives in a realm full of rats and windows, each window looking through a mirror where someone watches himself without hope, doomed to end under her influence.

despair_of_the_endless.png

Delirium: One of my personal favorites, she is the youngest one of the Endless. Once she was Delight, now a half crazed, eccentric girl that constantly changes appearances, her hair always in a different style and her eyes another color in every picture. Even her text expresses the instability of her character, wavy colorful letters spilling out and dancing in every page. She seems to know things the other Endless don’t, and that knowledge pushes her to insanity.

delirium_sandman.jpg

Desire: Beautiful, merciless and without a specific gender he/she is Despair’s twin sister/brother. She/he seems to have a grudge against Dream and he/she misses no chance to give him a hard time. Her/his emblem is the heart shape and his/her realm a large human body with a gallery in the heart.

desire2.jpg

Destruction: An extremely large man with red hair and beard this is one of the most mysterious of the Endless, his first appearance in the series comes after many issues. Having a sword as his symbol Destruction creates and destroys things because it is the only way the world can go on, but his artistic talent are not quite developed as he’d like. Centuries ago he abandoned his responsibilities as an Endless and fled causing much conflict in the family.

destruction_sandman.jpg

Death: My favorite, the most charming gothic character ever created in art. She is a beautiful young girl dressed in black with an ankh as her sigil, always present twice in every being’s life, in its birth and death. She is a kind and loving person, optimistic although the grim of her business, she is the one that will settle the table and close the door behind her when the last creature will end.

death02.jpg

Dream: The main character of this series, Morpheus, the lord Kai’Ckul, creator of stories and shape shifter. He is a tall, extremely thin man with black hair and eyes with his helm as an emblem (created from the bones of a dead god). He once was cruel and insensitive but during the series he changes and faces the results of his previous harsh decisions.

sandman1.jpg

What, you need more to get excited about this? This is a story you start for fun and end up reading it again and again because you need it, it’s addictive, it’s Sandman!


17
Apr

The Sandman

sandman.jpg

The power of comics as a medium is unique, it the power of something combining some of the greatest advantages and disadvantages of other great art forms like literature and drawing. Every now and then comes a work of genius, an artistic creation so beautiful and poetic it’s hard to realize it’s just a comic, because it’s not. It’s a little bit of everything put together in a mix of something even superior. As far as I’m concerned the best example of this is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, something so extraordinary and breathtaking people still read it manically.

avatar1.JPGThis is the story of Dream, not the god of dreaming or the spirit of the stories but Morpheus, the manifestation of dreaming itself. He is one of the seven Endless, created long before humanity and destined to end when the last living creature will die, all of them personifications of something different and necessary. They are Destiny, Death, Delirium (who once was Delight), Despair, Desire, Destruction (long ago self-banished) and Dream, the mysterious tall, thin figure that creates the worlds we visit when our subconscious gains the upper hand. Reading every issue of this magnificent tale you will follow him in the present and past as “The king of dreams learns one must change or die and then makes his decision”.

I’ve spent half my life over pages and this might be my favourite work in literature, comics and drawing altogether, and before you hurry to object that it is literature you should know that it is the only comic book to ever have won the World Fantasy Award for its issue #19 (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), the next day the rules were changed so that it would never happened again. This is really not just a comic book, it’s the creating of a new world that affected story tellers, music artists, WWF wrestlers (it’s true, there’s a guy that fights wearing Sandman T-Shirts), people of all ages, you read it and it changes you in every page. To conclude I am not able to describe the phenomenon called The Sandman, get your asses of your chairs and go buy the issues (hard), the trade paperback albums (easy) or the Ultimate Sandman edition (expensive), don’t just sit here, go!

seekerwhsandman2.jpg

13
Apr

The Exterminators #17

exterminators01.jpg

exterminators-4.jpgThere are so many different kinds of comics, and it’s never bad to like or dislike a certain category, but some of them always seem capable of concentrating public reactions and loathing feelings. Those are the cynical, ironic, macabre sometimes, full of black humor and far-sighted remarks, comics like Hellblazer, Transmetropolitan, The Boys and so many others. One of them is Exterminators, at first look a splatter, old school horror comic about bugs but also a perceptive look on our community, its clichés and dark secrets.

Written by Simon Oliver the Exterminators is the story of, what else, an exterminating company ready to kill your bugs, rats, termites, heck whatever crawls in your walls and chews your leftovers. Not much you’d say, and you’d be wrong, for there’s more in this story. Like an insecticide company, Draxx, creating a new product that not only doesn’t kill pests but makes them huge, scary and extremely dangerous. Or the dark past of these characters which sometimes takes place in American prisons and others in eastern civil exterminators7.jpewars. And yeah, there is that ancient Egyptian curse, the scarabs, the dead pharaoh ready to resurrect and the box in which nobody knows what’s contained but that might be part of the secondary story for all we know (right).

This May with issue 17 the Exterminators begin a new story arc, “Showdown at Scatshot”, featuring guest art by Ty Templeton (Batman Adventures, The Simpsons). Stretch and Saloth (that creepy guy) visit a convention of exterminators where there are more going one than what meets the eye. Stretch finally confronts his sinister past and Saloth gets a tip about Draxx and what’s being created there. If you feel at all intrigued pick up this issue, it’s a pretty good point to check if you like the series and then look for the previous albums!

12
Apr

100 Bullets #83

When an absolutely great series like 100 Bullets is approaching its finale (well, not exactly, it’s in its last quarter anyway) every single issue is an event you just can’t ignore. It started in August ’99 and keeps on pioneering in the depths of noir, crime story telling and realistic narrating, a masterpiece in its kind, loved by critics and readers. Written by Brian Azzarello and drawn by Eduardo Risso (Johny Double, Batman) 100 Bullets is one of those stories you can’t put down and end up looking for all the previous albums!

risso_100bullets.jpg

The story is really complex and reveals itself in every story arc in a way that things you encountered before and didn’t seem to matter are now explained, and still not entirely, an ongoing puzzle, like watching Nolan’s Memento. In a setting sometimes pulled out of a noir film, others reminding Italian mafia and more usually the ghettos, the anti-heroes of this story make their choices knowing or not that everything fits in a greater plan, the ultimate control of America’s most secret syndicate that controlled the world the last half century (yeah, they were not always American, there was no America back then), the Trust. Where in this does agent Graves fit, with his strange suitcases and his secret agenda? As you keep reading you’ll make your own conclusions why this man goes around offering a chance for revenge and redemption, he gives people a gun, undisputable proof of why their lives were destroyed and 100 untraceable bullets, a carte blanche to kill the person responsible for their downfall. Intrigued?

samp-100bullets.jpg

In issue 83 the moment comes when Dizzy Cordova finds out what it takes to be a Minuteman and the Minutemen learn things about her that might hurt. Also Ronnie Rome’s story continues with him under a gun and his only friend ready to take the money and go, but you’d better check it out yourselves, no spoilers are needed. If you haven’t read it go get vol.1 First Shot, Last Call, if you have 83 will be out soon enough!

risso_100bullets2.jpg

11
Apr

Hellblazer #230

hellblazer.jpgThere are many disputable facts when you talk about comics, some of them though gather around them too many supporters to be ignored. Like who’s the best comics character in an ongoing series the last 20 years, if you ask me and some more thousands of readers we’ll tell you John Constantine, the Hellblazer. Many writers and artists of the best in the field have worked with this historical character and considered it an honour (Gaiman, Moore, Azarello, Risso, Ennis, Delano, Ellis, Carey, McKean, Frusin, god I can keep up all night) offering us some of the best stories we ever read about the absolute antihero, the cynic bastard whose friends always end up badly, the magus whose soul will be claimed by Satan himself, he’s John bloody Constantine and he’s the man!

hellblazer_all_his_engines.jpgHellblazer is something more than a comic series just like Sandman was something more than a fairy tale, but in a profoundly different way. It started in the 80’s, an era of neo-conservatism and numerous changes and it found its unique way of commenting on serious stuff like religion, politics, economics, hooligans and criminality through a satiric filter of black magic, demons, angels and magicians. It even made it to the big screen recently (Constantine, starring Keanu Reeves) in a totally different from the comic, though pretty decent edition.

After the last story arc written by Denise Mina and the one-shot issue by Mike Carey this is a new chapter in the series with a whole new creative team. Andy Diggle (The Losers, Batman Confidential, Swamp Thing) writing it and Leonardo Manco (Archangel, Doom) as the artist promise some old-school supernatural horror with a social conscience”. In this first issue of “In at the Deep End” John wakes up cuffed to a post in the river Thames while the tide is rising, if he’s going to survive this he’ll have to do some smooth talking, and pretty fast too.

John Constantine talking, I don’t know about you but I’ll be there!

7037_400×600.jpg

10
Apr

Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall

260px-1001nos.jpgThis column has dealt with Fables again, but this time it’s not about the ongoing story, this is an event in the Fables Universe that took place a few months ago but it’s never too late to experience. 1001 Nights of Snowfall, a hard cover book with stories written by Bill Willingham and drawn by Charles Vess, Brian Bolland, John Bolton, Michael Wm. Kaluta, James Jean, Tara McPherson, Derek Kirk Kim, Esao Andrews, Mark Buckingham, Mark Wheatley and Jill Thompson. Feeling dizzy? There’s more!

This is a collection of stories about the residents of Fabletown even before it was created, more information about your favourite characters and fill-ins of the stories we already partially knew. Snow White is imprisoned in Baghdad where the Sultan marries a woman every night and has her beheaded the next morning, to save her life she switches to the thing she know how to do best, story telling. Every night the story goes on and every morning the Sultan lets her live one more day until it is done, but how long will she survive before she succeeds in changing him? The well known tale of 1001 Arabian Nights is revived in this beautiful book where myths and legends meet their modern versions and tie in a tremendous outcome.

fables.jpg

What really happened when Snow White married Prince Charming, why Bigby hates his father the North Wind, how was Flycatcher’s life destroyed during the invasion of the Adversary, the past of Frau Totenkinder (yeap, she once was young) and even more grasping stories in this filling hard-cover wonder, already in the bookstores and comics places, look up for it!

fablesognprelimalt.jpg