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Mini Comic Reviews: February, 2025

This month I'll be taking a look at Superman For All Seasons, Ryan North's Fantastic Four, Black Science, Richard Stark's Parker, and The New Gods.

Fantastic Four (2023-)
By Ryan North and Various Artists

Recent writers have used the adventures of Marvel's first family to tell grand cosmic sagas, but Ryan North wanted to do something different. He just wanted to tell little sci-fi tales that would be over and done with in a single issue. Sure, there's some ongoing storylines, but this is a purely episodic series, something rare in modern mainstream comics, which are all about filling out a trade paperback. The great benefit of this format is that everyone, from the kids to Doom himself, has had their time in the spotlight. The surprise star has been Alicia, who has effectively become the team's Fifth Beatle. This is really just an amazing series, full of great stories and character work; the only complaint I really have is the artwork being horribly inconsistent. It started off strongly with Iban Coello on pencils, but after he left it has just been a rotating group of increasingly weak fill-in artists.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Superman For All Seasons (1998)
By Tim Sale and Jeph Leob

This is something of a companion piece to Leob and Sale's classic Batman miniseries The Long Halloween as well as another new take on the character's origins. DC just loves to do new versions of Superman's origin, even when they aren't rebooting their whole fictional universe. This one chronicles Clark's early days as Superman, told from four different POVs (Jonathan, Lois, Lex, and Lana), one for each season of the year. Narratively it's all rather run of the mill. The main selling point here is the wonderful Norman Rockwell influenced art by the late, great Tim Sale. His Superman is just a big cuddly teddy bear, and his splash pages are just stunning.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Richard Stark's Parker (2009-2013)
By Darwyn Cooke

Cooke was a huge fan of the Parker novels written by Donald E. Westlake (under the pen name Richard Stark) and managed to adapt four of them (The Hunter, The Outfit, The Score, and Slayground) before his untimely death in 2016. Parker is a career criminal, as methodical as he is ruthless, who has just pulled off another successful heist, but is betrayed afterwards by his girl and partner. After being left for dead, he makes his way to New York to take revenge on both and reclaim what was taken from him. The world that Parker inhabits in a brutal and unforgiving one, but the 60s setting, along with Cooke's retro art style and inventive storytelling, makes it all look so irresistible you want to spend as much time there as you can. Just a fantastic crime series, but also serves as a grim reminder of what an amazing talent we lost so soon.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The New Gods (2024-)
By Ram V and Evan Cagle

Darkseid is dead and that has created a power vacuum amongst the New Gods. At the same time, a New New God has been born on Earth and, fearful of what it will unleash, Highfather has dispatched Orion to kill it. Like Inhumans and Eternals, the New Gods is one of those Jack Kirby concepts that many creators over the decades have struggled to make great (including Kirby himself). Ram V and Evan Cagle are the latest to take a crack at them and so far (I'm two issues in) the results are mixed to say the least. The artwork (by Cagle and guest artists) is fantastic, but it doesn't really feel like this series is really doing anything new or interesting.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Black Science (2013-2019)
By Rick Remender and Matteo Scalera

This series reminded me of Sliders, another story about a scientist who invents a machine for crossing dimensions, but it goes wrong forcing him and his friends to travel from world to world in a desperate struggle to get back home. There's also an element of Lost in Space as the scientist's kids and a shifty saboteur are dragged along as well. But those shows were both bound by the limitations of TV budgets. Being a comic, Black Science had no such limitations, allowing the creators to come up with some truly out there alternative worlds. There's a lot to enjoy in this series, but it really suffers from none of the characters being all that engaging and the multiverse now being such a played out concept.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011 More Mark Greig

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