#Image Comics reviews

[dispatchdcu]

Transformers #13 Review

Transformers #13 Review #transformers #comics #comicbooks #news #imagecomics #skybound #art #info #NCBD #amazon #comicbooknews #previews #reviews

Writer: Daniel Warren Johnson Artist: Jason Howard Colorist: Mike Spicer Letterer: Rus Wooton Cover Artists: Daniel Warren Johnson & Mike Spicer; Jorge Corona & Mike Spicer; Viktor Bogdanovic; Jorge Fornés; Francesco Mattina; Homare; Ludo Lullabi; John Giang; Björn Barends; Mico Suayan; Alan Quah; Deegan Puchkors; Juan Gedeon; Livio Ramondelli; Erik Eliarrez; Tiago Da Silva; Ivan Tao; Sajad Shah;…

[rontra]

ok it turns out if you draw kawakami a lot you'll end up with a lot of kawakami pics

[ultra-phthalo]

TF EU Soundwave In Issue 7 Sky Bound

[Listens to 'Mother Russia Bleeds Night Brawlers' as I read Soundwave beating the bolts out of Starscream in a volcano.]

God damn Soundwave is preying on Starscream. Walking around him and taking his time. Starscream is cornered. And Soundwave acts, letting it slip in the end about how bitter he was that Starscream had kicked his Ravage. The fire, smoke and sharp boulders of the active volcano. The glow of magma being the Decepticons only light source throughout the scene. Transitions. Snapping into a sunny scene on the Autobot's side away from the Decepticons. This change from fire to sunshine is meant to act as a comparison for the talk Arcee has with Carly. Carly is just as bitter about the harm Starscream had caused in her life; as Soundwave is bitter about Starscream running the Decepticons into the ground and harming the cassettes. Carly wants to take out her anger on Starscream as much as Soundwave does.

Soundwave isn't just beating Starscream for control. He's manifesting as the hate that the Autobot's claim they'll refuse to become participants of. And it's saying Carly is acting like a Decepticon. When Cliffjumper refused to kill Starscream. Carly pushed Cliffjumper away socially and doesn't want to talk to him. Considering his refusal as a betrayal to the trust she had in him. Carly does this without knowing the true reason as to why Cliff wouldn't shoot. The reason likely being that Cliff takes being an Autobot so seriously he considers killing a pleading bot a Decepticon act. But right now she doesn't care to listen to the warning the Autobots are giving her.

[lunarharp]

figured i'd do this again..bit early i guess..

[kyouka-supremacy]

(╥﹏╥)

[kryptonbabe]

The Closet, the existential familial horror of a broken home, a review

The Creature and concept sketches for the character From the horror comic book The Closet (2022) written by James Tynion IV, art by Gavin Fullerton

This short miniseries was much more a depressing read than a scary one, the sinister imagery paired with the very real troubles faced by the adult main characters work to articulate how kids perceive conflict and hostility. Children can be very sensitive and their world follows slightly different rules, events tend to be felt more intensely. Their whole life is on the balance, their tiny little existence, they can't see things through the lens of different perspectives only experience can help them develop. There's an urgency to your problems when you're 4 years old, like the kid in this story.

But the focus of The Closet is not exclusively about this kid's fear of a monster, we get to see the lives of his parents too, more specifically his dad, a guy living a mid-life crisis, facing the horror of who he has become and how he feels trapped in a life that he should be grateful for. Then we get to see how the dad's and the kid's fears are connected, how we affect each other sometimes without realizing, how deeply we can scar those we love. And it's terrifying, but mostly it is depressing, and the comic does a good job with the art and writing to build this little bleak yarn, so alien and yet so familiar.

This comic has only 3 issues and the themes while not heavy can be upsetting for their hopelessness, yet for its short length the narrative is well balanced in its existential musings and creepy moments. I'm a fan of the naturalism of Tynion's writing here and Fullerton's sketchy and moody looking art also work to create a somber atmosphere, fitting for a claustrophobic familial horror like this.

[todayisafridaynight]

family outing

[superpoweredfancast]

Witchblade #5 Review

Witchblade #5 Image Comics Written by Marguerite Bennett Art by Giuseppe Cafaro Colors by Arif Prianto Letters by Troy Peteri The Rundown: Sara attempts to resist the Witchblade and everything it offers as she continues to investigate a personal matter. Sara is having dark and disturbing dreams about the Witchblade and what it is potentially doing to her. Things become more intense for her…

[alexistalkscomics]

Creature From The Black Lagoon Lives! Issue #1: A promising start to the return of a classic monster

The 1954 classic, Creature From The Black Lagoon is one of my favourite movies of all time and the Gill-Man is in my opinion, one of the greatest movie monsters ever conceived.

So when I subscribed to Global Comix and saw that the first issue of Dan Watters and Ram V’s Creature From The Black Lagoon Lives! was available, I just had to read it.

Set after the events of the original film and ignoring its sequels, the comic serves as a standalone sequel that follows Kate Marsden, a journalist who is on an investigation in Peru that’s seemingly connected to a past trauma and is otherwise, completely disconnected to Gill-Man

Whilst some people might question this creative decision by the writers, I think that it very much works in the issue’s favour as it means that readers who aren’t familiar with the original film don’t have to worry about feeling locked out and it also gives the story a different set up to the film which allows it to avoid feeling like it’s just an adaptation of the movie.

The lack of Gill-Man in this issue is also another decision that works in its favour as it allows the Creature to slowly be built up as a more sinister and scary presence compared to the family friendly tone of the film.

However, the length and pacing of the issue left me feeling mildly disappointed as the page count combined with the brisk pace of the story made it feel quite abrupt when the issue ends on a cliffhanger.

Credit for creating an appropriately creepy atmosphere must also go to the somewhat scratchy (in a good way) art style of Mathew Roberts. One scenes that particularly earns him my praises is near the end of the issue where we see Gill-Man for the first time. When I read this scene, I felt the exact same sense of dread and excitement as when I first watched the film and saw the Creature in full for the first time.

My main and only real criticism for the visual aspects of the book is that the series is in colour. Even though Dave Stewart’s realistic colouring style compliments Roberts’ art well, I think that I would have preferred that the series be in black and white to enhance the feeling of the book as a tribute to one of the best movies of the fifties era.

Overall, Creature From The Black Lagoons Lives! #1 is by no means perfect or particularly groundbreaking but it gives readers a strong opening to a promising reintroduction to one of the best but often most overlooked parts of the Universal Monsters canon.

8/10

[calvinreadscomics]

Joe Death and the Graven Image by Benjamin Schipper is Bananas. I love this comic to death. The most immediately striking thing about Joe Death is its illustrations, which are drawn in an incredibly individual style born of an amalgamation between Mignola spot blacks, rubber hose style cartooning, an incredible eye for abstraction and appealing simplification, and gorgeous flat coloring which makes ample and ingenious use of gradients to hint at lighting, accent shape, and give scenes greater depth. Benjamin Schipper is also consistently innovative and impressive with his page layouts and paneling, frequently breaking panel borders and otherwise playing with the conventions of comics presentation to the benefit, usually, of both the flow of a page and its aesthetic appearance as a whole. The dialogue in Joe Death is also highly commendable for its style. Schipper writes in an archaic and lyrical style, peppered with aphorisms and bits of folk wisdom, which I found incredibly delightful and impressively literate and genuine, reading like a blast from the past rather than a modern writer putting on airs. The world-building in Joe Death is similarly engrossing. There's a sense of mythos, personal history, and social ecosystem permeating every new location, character interaction, and new piece of information. A world made wholly new, like the art style, from familiar pieces and a fascinating individual sensibility. If Joe Death stumbles anywhere it's occasionally in readability, as the style once or twice obscured certain details from me and caused me to lose track of what was happening. That's a minor gripe though, especially in a story where obscurity often seems to be the point and vibes, environment, and again that pervading sense of mythology take precedence. Joe Death was an incredibly exciting and enjoyable read, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

4.5/5

[dispatchdcu]

Witchblade #4 Review

Witchblade #4 Review #Witchblade #comics #comicbooks #news #art #info #NCBD #comicbooknews #previews #reviews #IMAGE #Amazon #imagecomics

Writer: Marguerite Bennett Artist: Giuseppe Cafaro Colorist: Arif Prianto Letterer: Troy Peteri Editors: Marc Silvestri, Matt Hawkins & Elena Salcedo Cover Artists: Giuseppe Cafaro & Arif Prianto; Jerome Opeña & Sunny Gho Publisher: Top Cow Productions & Image Comics Price: $3.99 Release Date: October 16, 2024 Sara Pezzini masquerades as a dirty cop. She pretends she didn’t perform heinous acts…

[doomed-jester]

There are a few things I'm really digging about Spawn (around 34 issues in so far) but I gotta say: I ADORE the secondary characters.

Burke and 'Twitch?' Icons, when I read Blood Feud I was genuinely scared for Twitch.

Wanda, Terry and Cyan? I love that we still get this ongoing family dynamic. It serves as a reminder of what Al's lost while also giving us a chance to have some real wholesome moments.

The alleyway ensemble? Wonderful. Bobby and Bootsie in particular. Look at this interaction!!

Jason Wynn is also a perfectly loathsome bastard, the real "character you love to hate" type. I do hope they do more with the whole anti-spawn thing, but since we have a new Redeemer, it doesn't seem likely.

On top of all that, the guest writers really elevate the book, especially in the minis (though I maintain that Blood Feud could and probably should have been part of the main book and not a tie-in). Talented writers like Gaiman and Moore do a lot with the material, but I have to say that Dave Sim's guest spot on issue 10 was especially fun. It's pretty self contained but fantastically surreal and works as a good interlude/pacebreak chapter.

That's not to disparage McFarlane's own writing, but it's obvious that he's a little too reliant on exposition to get his stories across and doesn't have the same way with prose that Moore does. An Alan Moore story will also be pretty wordy but it rarely feels extraneous in the same way that McFarlane's writing can (especially in earlier issues).

[youtwitinmyface]

CHAPEL

Written by Brian Witten & Eric Stephenson Drawn by Tom Tenny & Calvin Irving Published by Image Comics

The character of Chapel is a standard Big Muscular Soldier With Lots of Guns that Rob Liefeld is known for, making his debut in the very first issue of Youngblood, the series that launched Image Comics. He was former U.S. soldier and CIA operative named Bruce Stinson who was recruited onto the first Youngblood team and given the codename Chapel (I don't think it was ever explained what the name is supposed to mean). His distinguishing characteristics are that he’s a Black man, and he wore face paint of a white skull on his face. In an early synergistic connection of the burgeoning Image Comics Universe, it was eventually revealed that Chapel was the man who murdered Al Simmons, who then came back as Todd McFarlane’s Spawn. When Spawn finally remembered that, he tracked down Chapel looking for revenge, but instead of killing him he burned the paint on Chapel’s face, now giving him a permanent skull-face (the implication is that this would make Chapel, who was a notorious womanizer in her personal life, look like a freak and that would scare women away from him, which is something that would be worse than death for a man like him).

I'll note that when the character appeared in the 1997 Spawn animated series he was named Jess Chapel. Chapel was also revealed to have HIV (which was purposely injected in him by his old boss, Jason Wynn, another character from Todd McFarlane's Spawn series), which got him removed from Youngblood and sent to the covert ops Bloodstrike team.

This two-part series, published in February 1995, takes place during that time, as Chapel is alone and feeling like his life is spiraling out of control, and he flashes back to a mission he had when he was still a U.S. Government soldier.

It’s 1983, Chapel leads a handpicked squad of soldiers to Nicaragua, where they’ve been sent to assassin a man identified only as Col. Black, said to have been a former U.S. ally who’s gone rogue and set himself up as some kind of warlord. We’re introduced to his team of six soldiers but even though Chapel notes the specific skills of each one (one is a martial arts expert, one speaks multiple languages, etc.), it’s pretty clear that these guys are basically red shirts, just there to further Chapel’s story. The only notable thing about any of them is that one is named Billy Zane and one is named Jet Li. The team lands in the jungle where they immediately encounter some of Black’s soldiers and a massive gunfight ensues, which Chapel and his team win. But Chapel has noted that there were rumors of Col. Black engaging in voodoo and necromancy, and he sees evidence of that when one of the dead soldiers speaks to him after Chapel killed him. The team continues exploring the jungle, cutting through a lake where Chapel is suddenly dragged underwater by a giant anaconda.

In issue number two, which came out a month later, Chapel of course survives the anaconda attack, and the team makes it to a local village where they see that all of the villagers had been slaughtered and had their hearts ripped out. Even Chapel is outraged at the loss of all those innocent civilians and is determined to make Col. Black pay for them. They then get attacked and surrounded by another batch of soldiers, but these are zombies, making them extra difficult to “kill.” Most of Chapel’s team gets killed (like I said: redshirts) and this leads to Chapel’s one-on-one showdown with Col. Black, who does turn out to possess demonic powers.

This series is heavy on action, and lots of brutal gun violence, ably illustrated by Tom Tenny and Calvin Irving in the first issue and just by Irving in the second issue. It’s like a Rambo movie on paper. The story itself shows that Chapel is not the unfeeling brute that he often appeared to be, through the anger he felt at the deaths of the villagers and his team members, plus at one point he admits to himself that he’s scared. He also shows intelligence in figuring out how to defeat Col. Black. Thus it's an entertaining little series for what it is.

Unfortunately, the series is long out-of-print and not available for sale digitally, but I'd recommend tracking down copies if you're a fan of Rob Liefeld's Extreme Universe characters. Chapel (02/1995 1st Series) comic books 1990-1999

[ferronickel]

No new Looking Glasses pages today. Not for lack of trying, but tumblr decided to hide the post from everyone’s dash, so I’ll repost it once I find a way to fix that.

[kryptonbabe]

Ice Cream Man Vol. 2: Strange Neopolitan, a review

Ice Cream Man Vol. 2 by W. Maxwell Prince, Chris O'Halloran & Martín Morazzo

The most interesting thing about Ice Cream Man is how the writing and the art work in a delicate balance to hold all the elements in the series together. This is not an original book for its constructions blocks, but in the way these blocks are organized and how they inform each other. The nihilistic tone of some of the stories could be hard to engage with if not paired with the absurdism of the narrative and the dash of dark humor applied. The multiple characters and perspectives also offer an escape, even if momentary, for the existential dread.

This is a pretty bleak collection of stories and they employ a strong voice to guide you through them, admittedly this desolate tone might not be for everyone. I'm usually not a fan of a gloomy and sarcastic narration style, but the clean art and the other narrative elements lend earnestness to the stories told. The characters in this god forsaken world feel real and not cardboard cutouts built to reinforce the general hopelessness of the main voice, some of them are grieving, suffering, feeling compassionate, loving each other, but unfortunately they exist in this fictional world where happiness is so fleeting. The horrors they face might happen in bizarre scenarios, but they feel very real, dealing with drug abuse, the loss of loved ones, depression etc. This kind of horror is highly effective to move me, more so than explicit, graphic stories. The dread feels pervasive, uncomfortable, and yet meaningful

It's sinister to realize that under all surrealism through which we see this world, their reality is not so different from ours. And that's what is really scary about Ice Cream Man, there are monsters in this universe, but the reality that is hidden behind its fantastic veneer is the real horrific aspect of the series

I had a terrible time and I thoroughly enjoyed it