Category: 1995
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Only in Dark Horse Presents can you open with Art Adams and close with Paul Pope. The Adams Monkeyman and O’Brien story appears to be some kind of homage to Plan 9 from Outer Space. So maybe Adams’s terrible dialogue is in line with that approach. Regardless, it’s fairly awful. Then Hernandez has an utterly…
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I guess Dave Gibbons had no quibbles about Frank Miller ripping off Watchmen for their Martha Washington story this issue. Nice art, bad writing. Forney’s got an anecdote about meeting Tom Waits. It has some charm, but not enough to sustain it. Then Geary’s back with a one page strip, as are Pekar and Sacco.…
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The Concrete story goes on forever, but it’s actually pretty funny how it turns out. Not funny enough to laugh at, but Chadwick definitely comes up with something amusing. Oh, I’ll just spoil it–a mom and son pull a long con on Concrete for something he did back in his first appearance. Decent art, nothing…
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The opening Hellboy story has, just on the surface, one major problem. Hellboy wrote Abe a letter, the text of that letter is the story’s narration. Hellboy writes letters where he sounds like an expository narrator. How uninteresting. Then it turns out the story’s actually Hellboy’s secret origin (he’s the son of a demon and…
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Where to start…. Miller opens the issue with sort of a “ha ha, you can’t say it’s misogynistic because it’s intentional” Lance Blastoff! story. Killing dinosaurs, eating meat, those are the things women really need whether they know it or not. The writing’s crap—no shock—but Miller at least draws the dinosaurs. Bennett and Guinan’s Heartbreakers…
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This teaser for Dark Horse Presents 100 has some great stuff in it… but it also has some unbearably long entries. Chadwick’s Concrete—though it’s always fun to read Concrete assuming the worst about humanity—goes on forever and turns out to be a prologue. It’s a little lame, though Chadwick’s art is decent. LaBan’s Emo and…
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Campbell finishes Doreen Grey here and it’s an awkward installment. It’s almost like he would have been better not resolving things. He’s got a lot of expositional dialogue here from the Eyeball Kid and it really just doesn’t work. It’s maybe his least successful Presents entry and story (the story gradually getting weaker over time).…
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I’m tempted to mention Cooper’s one page strip first because it’s a page and I don’t really have anything to say about it. Oops, there I went and did. Brubaker and Gaudiano finish up Here and Now. It’s got a bit of a surprise ending, which makes perfect sense, but for whatever reason (probably a…
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I wonder what Rennie’s Kabuki Kid scripts look like. This installment has a setup, introduces some villains, then it just goes wild. Langridge has the Kabuki Kid and his sidekick fighting an army of adversaries (though it does get weeded through fast). It’s funny and fast, even better than the first installment. Schutz and Pander…
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I’m not sure if Presents has ever had such a good issue. They may have… but this one’s rather excellent. Brubaker and Gaudiano’s Here and Now is a detective story, but one with an introspective, lost in his thoughts not his cases detective. Gaudiano’s artwork is fantastic–it’s basically a guy walking around most of the…
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LaBan finishes Eno and Plum better than he started but not as good as the second installment. I think this one is the first I laughed out loud reading, but the story’s predictable and LaBan still doesn’t do anything to turn Plum into a character. Worse, he gives her these moronic thoughts. I’d say it’s…
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Okay, so the issue opens with Eddie Campbell doing an action story. It’s not all action, but there’s a bunch of action. It’s crazy—there’s a big fight scene. Campbell keeps all the humor and a lot of the thoughtfulness (he tones down the thoughtfulness a little) and adds a regular fight scene. It’s crazy and…
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This issue’s content implies the Presents editors didn’t care about the script, as long as the art was good. It’s a real improvement, actually, since there are some issues whether neither are any good. I’ll start with Blackheart to get it out of the way. Morrison uses demonic possession as his deus ex machina here.…
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Here’s an idea… take a script from the guy who wrote Midnight Run–I imagine that film had some rewrites from Martin Brest, but George Gallo did come up with it–and turn it into a complete mess. What’s interesting about Bad Boys is what isn’t wrong with it… what nearly works in it…. Michael Bay doesn’t…
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The Brothers McMullen is filled with moments of brilliant filmmaking. More than enough. It just doesn’t finish off on one of them. The film needs to go out as strongly as it starts and it comes up short. Burns’s filmmaking is organic (undoubtedly a result of a long filming and imaginative editing) and the ending…
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I read The Tale of One Bad Rat in one sitting. It was originally published as a limited series, but it’s in three parts and the first part is too long for an issue so it didn’t seem like a natural stopping point. Talbot weighs the book uniquely, with the first act taking far longer…
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Between Joaquim de Almeida and Carlos Gómez, it certainly appears Robert Rodriguez likes good actors. He even gets a great performance from Cheech Marin, but I suppose Marin didn’t need much direction. So with those three good performances and two good actors–de Almeida even does well with Rodriguez’s atrocious dialogue, something not even Steve Buscemi…
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Ok, I missed the part about the cataclysmic world altering events only taking place in the West and not effecting anything else in America. Apparently, Delano doesn’t like the Huron. Though there was that great picture of the yachts fleeing Manhattan. It’s a confused conclusion, really more about the bad guy getting his comeuppance than…
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Well, the issue I’ve been dreading, the one where Delano explains all the backstory, here it is. And is it as bad as I’d anticipated? Oh, yeah. As the American people flock–nude–to the wilderness to become one with the land (it’s an interesting idea, the land of America is magical, whereas the rest of the…
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See, a cliffhanger. The bad guy is getting ready to do something bad and “to be continued.” It’s an awkward issue, a bridging one, setting up the big conclusion. The comic takes place over a few hours, giving the reader a few pages (at least) with each member of the cast. Unfortunately, Delano gives one…
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For the first time, Delano just writes an issue–meaning there’s no crazy illuminati explanations this time around. Instead, it’s just an issue. And it’s a good comic book. The potential finally starts to be fulfilled here, with the coyote guy meeting up with the comic’s messiah figure (who just happens to get a romantic interest…
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The second issue has a whole bunch of problems. Some relate to the first issue, some don’t. The biggest one–Big Brother is real and has been fighting the Native American culture for five hundred years, all of Western culture is a fake, controlled by them–really annoys. Delano’s got some solid ideas, but when he tries…
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So far–and one issue of six isn’t far enough to judge, I know–Ghostdancing isn’t impressing me. It takes the entire issue to get to the hook–the animal gods (or something like animal gods) have lost one of their own and it turns out she was a big hippie music star in the sixties in “the…
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Virtuosity, being from the 1990s, is from the era when both Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington didn’t only appear in films directed by the Brothers Scott and Kelly Lynch was still in movies getting theatrical releases. It’s an early CG movie, with lots of computer references and set in the “near future.” It’s incredibly solid,…
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Cliff’s New York Adventure doesn’t feature any New York landmarks. No Rocketeer at the Empire State Building or Statue of Liberty. There’s a neat guest appearance by the Shadow (Stevens does a great job of dodging copyright infringement). It’s got a lot going on–there’s the resolution of the first story’s cliffhanger as Cliff confronts Betty…
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Sometimes competency is a bad thing. Screamers is a fairly well-made–Duguay’s composition isn’t spectacular, mostly because the sets were all CG embellished so there was only so much he was actually shooting–but there are some excellent effects sequences. There’s some nice stop motion and then a great shuttlecraft liftoff. Duguay knows how to spend his…
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I saw Judge Dredd at a sneak preview. It was the first time I ever saw anyone walk on a movie. It fits into a rather interesting category of disastrous would-be blockbusters–joining Flash Gordon, The Black Hole and Dune–where there’s this largely international cast–why are Jürgen Prochnow and Max von Sydow playing, basically, New Yorkers–and…
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I can’t decide what moment of The Crossing Guard is my favorite. I have it narrowed down to two. It’s either the (louder) one at the end, where Jack Nicholson realizes where he is and how he got there, or it’s when I realized Anjelica Huston–who starts the film in a support group–has never spoken…
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I haven’t seen Waterworld since the theater–probably opening day. I remember it being an unimpressive sci-fi adventure without a lot of distinct characteristics, but certainly not a disaster. Watching it again after fourteen years, that description holds (for the most part). The film–even in the three hour extended version–moves quickly. There’s always something going on,…
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Dead Man is not a strange film. I haven’t seen it in ten years and I’ve probably seen the majority of the Westerns I’ve seen in that interim. So the opening, as Johnny Depp watches the familiar Western trappings pass from a train window, probably didn’t resonate on my last viewing. What Jarmusch doesn’t get…
The Stop Button 