By Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang
On the morning of November 1st 1988, four twelve-year-old newspaper delivery girls (Erin, Mac, KJ, and Tiffany) from a Cleveland suburb find themselves unwillingly caught up in a war between rival groups of time travellers. I first heard about this when I saw a trailer for the short lived Amazon adaptation, which I never actually got around to watching (I planned to, but then it got cancelled and I just didn't see the point). Powered by a strong group of heroines, this is a fun mix of The Breakfast Club and Back to the Future (well, Back to the Future Part II) with a lot of Doctor Who thrown in to shake things up. However, I found the final arc to be somewhat anti-climatic, and Vaughan tended to go a little overboard on all the pop culture references in order to remind us what decade each character is from.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
By Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen
After a devastating attack by mysterious giant machines known as Harvesters, androids are outlawed throughout the galaxy. Ten years later, companion droid Tim-21 awakens on an abandoned colony to find everyone dead, his family missing, and the world a much hasher place for synthetics. Descender is like A.I. (the Spielberg/Kubrick movie, not the tech that is slowly killing our planet one terrible picture at a time) if it was bigger, bleaker, and more gnarly. There a few obvious twists, and the ending is abrupt in order to set up the sequel series (which I have yet to read), but all in all this is a gripping sci-fi epic.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
J. H. Williams III, Greg Rucka, W. Haden Blackman and Others
This book collects together earliest adventures of Kate Kane/Batwoman as a headliner including Rucka and Williams' 'Elegy' arc from Detective Comics along with Williams run on the 2011 Batwoman series as artist and co-writer with Blackman. The main selling point here is Williams' artwork, which is just phenomenal throughout, but as much as I like Kate as a protagonist, after Rucka left the stories the Williams and Blackman gave her were often substandard (more so whenever there was a fill-in artist) and the supporting characters forgettable. It got to the point where even William's artwork wasn't enough to keep me invested. I gave up just before final arc, which was completed by a different team after Williams and Blackman quit in protest over DC's refusal to let Kate marry her girlfriend.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
by Greg Rucka, Darick Robertson, and Leandro Fernández
Apart from that infamous cover (which Esad Ribić intentionally made as erotic as he could get away with), not much is ever said these days about Rucka's short run on Wolverine. After finally reading the whole thing I can see why. It's a slow moving, lowkey, moody crime thriller that cast Logan in the role of the wandering detective figure. Instead of fighting supervillains, cyborgs, or ninja death cults, he's out of costume and taking down cult leaders and human traffickers. The first arc is fine, but things start to go off the rails in the second, and the final arc starts off bad and just continues to get worse and worse. It is honestly one of the most atrocious things I have ever read. It isn't often I say this, and will likely be the only time in my life I ever will, but Marvel made the right move by replacing Rucka with Mark Miller.
Rating: ⭐⭐
By Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra
What if the creation of the atomic bomb was just a cover for something far more frightening? On the surface, The Manhattan Projects seems like exactly the sort of thing you'd expect from Hickman with its many hidden layers and decades spanning storyline, but he does the unexpected thing and turns it all into an absurdist black comedy. This is just utterly insane series, one of those things you read and wonder who the writer's supplier is. It starts with J. Robert Oppenheimer being killed, eaten and replaced by his psycho twin brother and it just gets wilder from there. Pitarra was the perfect artistic partner to bring this deranged world to life, but like so many of Hickman's indie works it doesn't really have a proper conclusion. The plan was to move to a sequence of miniseries so the creators could work at their own pace, but only one was released and the series has been on hiatus since 2018.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
By Rob Liefeld
Bad guy on yacht does something. Good guys go fight him. That's literally it. I only gave this a look out of morbid curiosity and to see if by some miracle Liefeld had managed to grow, in any way, as an artist and storyteller. Foolish of me to even consider it. The man's incapable of growth and is even worse than ever. For someone who has been working in comics for nearly 40 years now, he remains an exceptionally terrible visual storyteller. Everything is just so stiff, awkward, and lifeless, his characters an uneven collection of weird limbs and torsos, and his continuity is mind-numbingly bad. In one sequence Shaft's mask is unable to stay the same shape from one page to the next while the weapons on his back change, disappear, reappear and change again. This is just lazy on every level, the work of a man who knows he has a built-in audience (lord only knows why) so never feels the need to put in any effort because they'll still buy his crap no matter how substandard it is.
Rating: ⭐
Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011 More Mark Greig
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