The Saga Re-Read: Saga #4

View fullsize

Lying Cat and his human, The Will. 

By Zack Quaintance & Cory Webber — This is it folks, the last issue before we start the final 50-issue home stretch. We're officially within a year of finishing this project! I can't speak for Cory (whom I know is itching to read ahead at a faster pace...and who could blame him?), but I've gotten quite a bit out of this little re-read project so far.

Part of the logic for doing this was to keep the story and the characters fresh in my mind during the one-year hiatus. This series is so well-done, though, that doing a slow re-read is having the added advantage of making me aware of layers and character growth I might have glazed over during my first read, when every time I cracked an issue I was mostly just concerned with what's going to happen?! Essentially, that's all a verbose way of noting that taking Saga at a slow, weekly pace is a new experience for me as a re-reader and I'm noticing things I might have missed the first time. 

Onward!

Saga #4

Here's the official preview text from way back when for Saga #4: 

Welcome to SEXTILLION, a distant planet where even your darkest fantasies become reality. See why everyone's talking about this hit new ongoing adventure from BRIAN K. VAUGHAN and FIONA STAPLES!

Oooo, that's all a bit more descriptive than the last two weeks. Sextillion! How exciting. The solicit has also segued from touting the book as a controversy to embracing it's roll as a budding mega-hit, the likes of which Image (and, really, the industry) hadn't seen since Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead, which took a few years and a successful TV adaptation to really get rolling. Saga, meanwhile, was a hit right from the start. Now on to your takes!

A Re-Reader’s Perspective by Zack: This issue gives us another of Saga's distinctive intro pages, one of the first of many to come. Really, this whole issue is another pretty slow one, especially as it pertains to our central family with all the main action happening off-panel and the dramatics relying on conversation. It is interesting to look back at, though, because it depicts a desire on Vaughan's part to make even his villainous characters sympathetic right from the start (talking of The Will here). Sometimes I feel like comics writers become enamored with villains and backwards engineer sympathy. Not here, though. This issue also has that panel that I reference in my spoiler heavy Why Saga #54 Hurts So Bad piece. Sigh.

A New Reader’s Perspective by Cory Webber:  Well, Sextillion is, umm, interesting. I’ve heard of these unique opening pages that Saga likes to throw our way, and this one was unique, for sure. Moreover, I quite enjoyed the back-and-forth banter between Alana and Izabel. I feel that relationship is going to grow on me. Also, it was nice to see that The Will can be sympathetic, at least as it applies to saving child sex slaves. And, it was nice to see that flat-headed slaver get his comeuppance. We have been getting a lot of great personal, character moments and relationship/world building, but that appears to be changing soon based on the last page. I can’t wait to see how the action and mayhem unfurls.

Cory’s New Reader Predictions:  We will be seeing the wrath of Gwendolyn, at some point. And I cannot wait for it!

Thanks for joining us, and be sure to check back next Friday for a discussion of Saga #5! Tweet us @BatmansBookcase with your own thoughts, and we may run them here next week...

Cory Webber is a work-from-home entrepreneur who also reads and reviews comics for fun. Find him on Twitter at @CeeEssWebber. He lives in Lehi, Utah with his wife and three sons.

Zack Quaintance is a journalist who also writes fiction and makes comics. Find him on Twitter at @zackquaintance. He lives in Sacramento, California.

Beyonders #1 by Paul Jenkins & Wesley St. Claire

View fullsize

Beyonders #1 is out Aug. 29. 2018.

By Zack Quaintance — The opening pages of Paul Jenkins and Wesley St. Claire’s Beyonders #1 are not unlike having a conversation with someone who is really into historical conspiracy theories at a party or a bar: the information comes at you so fast that you can’t make much sense of it...all you know is that there’s something much much larger going on here, something that may or may not be worth going all in on.

In that sense, Beyonders #1 does a great job opening up a new comic, throwing out an intriguing hook that basically encapsulates what this story is about, one that will surely make clear to like-minded readers that they’re in for something worthwhile. For those who are maybe a little overwhelmed with the opening, the creative team does a great job of getting us right to our protagonist, who himself then makes clear that he finds this all a bit overwhelming as well. That he does it with some funny too is another enticing quality laid out early by Beyonders.

That’s all really great on a surface level. What I found more enticing about this book was the hints at bigger questions about conspiracy culture, about how it’s accelerated in odd regions due to the Internet and about how certain types of people are prone to use it as a distraction from more tangible and immediate things in the world around them. It’s all so relevant for this tough year of 2018, and Jenkins and St. Claire do a great job of conveying that without being heavy-handed.

Some of the scenes of Jacob’s real life, however, are just a little too on the nose and convenient, especially one where he’s called into his principal’s office so the man can give him a speech and also inform him he’s been denied...by every college he applied to. That convenience took me out of the story a little bit (just a little), but thankfully the book is never far off from lapsing back into its central concern: conspiracies.

Jenkins and St. Claire are experienced creators who know their craft stuff, and the book reads quickly. Everything here is well-polished and easy to digest. Whether or not is proves to be a lasting series, however, will likely depend on how well it continues to unpack the reasons online culture has accelerated belief in conspiracies.

Overall: There are a lot of surprises in this comic, as one is right to expect from a book about conspiracies, and they’re all well-done. In the end, I’d heartily recommend this comic to anyone who gets lost down conspiratorial rabbit holes on the Internet with any degree of regularity. 7.0/10

For more comic book reviews, check out our review archives.

Zack Quaintance is a journalist who also writes fiction and makes comics. Find him on Twitter at @zackquaintance. He lives in Sacramento, California.

REVIEW: House Amok #1 by Christopher Sebela, Shawn McManus, Lee Loughridge, & Aditya Bidikar

View fullsize

House Amok #1 is available Aug. 29, 2018.

By Zack Quaintance — Simply put, writer Christopher Sebela is on fire, rolling out some of the most compelling creator-owned books in all of comics with a nigh-unparalleled range of themes, concepts, and genres. His summer started with the historic high seas/frontier revenge story Shanghai Red, continued with the satirical late-model-capitalist nightmare Crowded, and culminates now with the morbid reality-bending familial murder story, House Amok.

House Amok pulls the difficult double duty of orienting the reader with traces of recognizable tropes while mercilessly pushing into original circumstances as its story demands. Our leads are the Sandifers, a dysfunctional family the exact likes of which I’ve never seen, not in any medium, made unique not by the macabre violence they’re perpetrating—horrifying as it is, it has been done—but rather their justifications. That’s what makes this story so urgent and vital. Not only do the Sandifer parents utterly believe in some contorted and bloody logic, they’ve made it a matter of survival for themselves, their oldest son, and their younger fraternal twin girls, our protagonists.

It’s this decision that makes House Amok so compelling on essentially two separate fronts: first as a story of depravity and survival, and second as a tale of precocious innocents trying to parse the truth of their parents' dysfunctions. While there is little universality in the horror elements within House Amok, it’s this feeling of having to forge a world view from within the imperfect lens provided by one's parents that most (if not all) readers will relate to, hard. I could even see the story broadening into a look at shared delirium among certain segments of society. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing where Sebela and team take this narrative potential. 

From a craft perspective, House Amok is impeccable, as have been all the books from IDW's Black Crown imprint. Shawn McManus is a confident and veteran artist, and it shows in his linework, which conveys deep terrors from within a mundane childhood framework, and Lee Loughridge contributes much with a standout set of muted palettes and fitting color tones.

House Amok’s greatest strength, however, is the voice of its narration, which guides readers through the madcap reality-skewing imagery of this story with an orienting calm, poetic and assuring in a way that made my brain tingle. The twist at House Amok’s end is fittingly subdued, yet the unexpected nature of it is such that it ranks as one of the most chilling cliffhangers I’ve read in a #1 issue all year. Closing though: Egad, did I love this comic.

Overall — House Amok is a comic so rich and immersive that its ending will ambush you, leaving you demanding the second issue. It’s a childhood horror story that raises questions about fears, realities, innocence, and shared delusions. It is, quite simply, yet another must-read title from IDW’s Black Crown. 9.5/10

For more comic book reviews, check out our review archives.

Zack Quaintance is a journalist who also writes fiction and makes comics. Find him on Twitter at @zackquaintance. He lives in Sacramento, California.

ADVANCED REVIEW: Unnatural #1 by Mirka Andolfo

Look carefully and you may miss the pig features, likely a deliberate blurring of perception by artist/writer Mirka Andolfo.

By Zack Quaintance — Unnatural #1 has intrigued me since it was announced. The first sentence of its summary reads: Leslie is a simple pig girl. She loves sushi, she's stuck with a job she hates, and she lives under a brutal totalitarian government—one that punishes transgressors for anything deemed "unnatural." Meanwhile, its cover features said pig girl in a state of undress. Look quickly, and you almost miss the pig, so faint are the animal touches. See what I mean? Intriguing.

That aside, I didn’t know what to expect from this, first of a 12-part story originally published in writer/artist Mirka Andolfo’s native Italy. It is, however, pretty straightforward. Unnatural #1 is essentially an exploration of government interfering with sex and freedom. Andolfo has cited George Orwell’s novels as inspiration, which certainly shows. Indeed, a simplistic and reductive pitch for this book could be: Animal Farm meets 1984 with a dose of 2018 sexual politics.

The result, though, is a comic of the highest order. I loved Unnatural #1, from the artwork to the capital B Big ideas beneath it. This first issue is a joy, both entertaining and filled with smart questions. There’s a central metaphor here conjures images of governmental decisions on birth control, abortion, same-sex marriage...all of which are recent or ongoing.

This is, perhaps, part of why Unnatural works so well on an intellectual level. There has been tension between government and its constituents in this area likely back to the dawn of civilization, and Unnatural extrapolates what could happen if that tension tipped too far toward one side (in this story it’s a prurient interest in further reproduction among the same species).

Unnatural #1 does a wonderful job using relatable character moments to deliver its complex questions and central metaphor.

Past the Big ideas, however, the book is well-done and engaging, devoting time to relatable character moments—a love of sushi, a disdain for rain, banter between roommates—while checking standard first issue boxes: world-building, character names, cliffhanger ending, etc. As for the art, Andolfo’s work is sexy, reductive as that sounds. It isolates notions of beauty—steely blue eyes, voluptuousness, confident smirks—and telegraphs them onto anthropomorphic figures, giving the animals desirability, if only for a moment. Andolfo has said she doesn’t like drawing humans, and her choice to go anthropomorphic may be simple as that, but I suspect blurring lust lines between species was a deliberate means of depicting inherently fuzzy lines of sexual attraction.

I only took issue with one panel in this book. A lot of comics do a wonderful job of subtly building a central conceit without explicitly stating it—before going ahead and stating it anyway. One famous example is The Walking Dead, with a full-page early on wherein protagonist Rick Grimes yells something like, Don’t you see? WE are the walking dead? There’s a similar panel in Unnatural, though not as grievous. Really, it’s a small compliant in an otherwise stellar comic.

Overall: This is a captivating book, at once smart, poignant, and stylish. Andolfo clearly has strong thoughts about the intersection of sex and government, but she also knows well that those thoughts are best served by first and foremost telling an entertaining story. As a result, Unnatural #1 is not to be missed. 9.5/10

Unnatural #1 comes out July 4, 2018.

Zack Quaintance is a journalist who also writes fiction and makes comics. Find him on Twitter at @zackquaintance. He lives in Sacramento, California.

ADVANCED REVIEW: Euthanauts #1 by Tini Howard, Nick Robles, & Aditya Bidikar

Euthanauts #1 is an intriguing comic that lives up to its incredible cover art.

Tini Howard and Nick Robles’ Euthanuats #1 first caught my attention weeks ago with its title and cover. In tandem, the two evoke thoughts of a woman journeying through death, body withered to bones as her head and mind are protected by a glass bauble, one that glows with life and attracts insects like a light bulb. My interest was bolstered further by the books presence on IDW’s imprint, Black Crown, from former long-time Vertigo editor Shelly Bond. I’ve enjoyed all Black Crown offerings (more here), but it was another book by Howard that really stood out to me: Assassinistas, a collaboration with the legendary Gilbert Hernandez that applies complex modern family dynamics to an archetypal femme fatale death squad.

Whereas Assassinistas is more of a character study, one laced with appropriate bits of humor and modest bouts of action, Euthanuats is better-described as an abstract and surreal walk through our fears, expectations and attitudes around death. Our protagonist is an alienated receptionist who works in a funeral home and is dissatisfied with her life and friendships. For the first two-thirds of the book, the story grounds us in this struggle, functioning well as a slice-of-life comic.

Howard’s characterization is strong, with effective interior monologue lines like, “I was thinking about how weird it is that I don’t like my friends and they don’t really like me—when I first saw her…”, as well as snappy character banter, such as, “It’s like, communism works just fine, you just have to really, really likeable.” Robles art is also wonderful, detailed and realistic, glazed over with a fitting color palette that manages to be forlorn without tipping into morbid or noir.

Nick Robles' art in Euthanauts #1 depicts a non-conventional side of death.

It is, however, the plot point that catapults us into the third act that really establishes this book as something special. Not to give too much away, but reality blurs into a world of ethereal surrealism, seemingly a realm of death, or near death. It's unclear, and the book makes a wise decision to keep readers disoriented. I’ve been reading comics for two decades and change, and as such I’ve seen an excessive number of visual depictions of death, limbo, the afterlife, etc. I’ve rarely seen one as intriguing as in Euthanuats, which I take as a testament to both the imagination and research that went into this story.

This has already been a fantastic year for comics as unfettered explorations of nigh-universal fears, concerns, or hang ups (see Eternity Girl, Mister Miracle, and several inward-facing horror books), but Euthanauts charges headlong at the most towering concern of all—death—and emerges with a fascinating and beautifully-told story. I barely have a guess for where this book is headed next, and I love that.

Overall: Engrossing and complex, Euthanauts is the best book yet from former Vertigo editor Shelly Bond’s new IDW imprint, Black Crown. Howard’s script dives confidentiality into a universal concern—death—as Robles' ethereal visuals blur reality. An intriguing and gorgeous comic, this one is highly recommended. 9.0/10

Euthanauts #1 is out July 18. Learn more about it here!

Zack Quaintance is a journalist who also writes fiction and makes comics. Find him on Twitter at @zackquaintance. He lives in Sacramento, California.