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Shadows on the Grave (2016) #5
Creator Richard Corben’s got some co-writing help again on this issue of Shadows and it doesn’t work out. The whole issue just never quite works out, including the Greek epic, which bums me out.
The issue starts okay, with a one-page romance comic gag. Nice art too. The issue’s got excellent art from Corben throughout—including some great art on one of the stories—but it’s not enough to compensate for the slight writing.
The feature stories are all eight pages, which is a Shadows no-no. Corben does much better when he varies the length for what the story actually needs. None of the four features are balanced well this issue. It’s such a bummer.
The first story is about a guy who gets lost in the rain in rural America, pulls up at a stranger’s house, demands the old lady put him up for the night. Now, elements of that narrative have already appeared in Shadows within the last couple of issues. What’s the house’s secret, will the rude dude survive, and so on. It’s a mad-libs Corben horror strip.
The following story is the exact same situation. It feels very familiar—the protagonist is a shitty nephew gone to swindle a rich aunt (same setup as a story… in the last couple issues). When he gets there, his aunt’s got a secretary who makes him wait to see her, which gets the guy curious enough to snoop. Disaster ensues.
Beth Reed co-writes both stories. The first one’s better than the second, but the second is where it’s clear what’s going on. The script’s trying too hard to fit the “formula,” which seems to be because of Reed. It doesn’t make sense for Corben to write “more Corben” but with a co-writer.
I did just have the thought maybe a few writers used the same prompts from Corben. If so, those stories obviously should’ve been presented together and with context. This issue’s entries would still be lesser compared to whenever they appeared before, but the book wouldn’t seem repetitive, at least.
The third feature is Corben solo writing. A blind woman is in Africa trying to find a cure from a remote, hostile tribe. If Corben establishes the time period, it wasn’t forcefully enough I remember, but hopefully, it’s sometime in the mid-twentieth century and not today.
The art’s phenomenal, with Corben illustrating from the point of view of the blind woman, which is incredible stuff. The script’s just okay—the plot’s underwhelming, and the twist is creaky—but the art makes up for it. Though it’s still a bummer. The first story didn’t work out, the second story didn’t work out, the third story didn’t work out.
Surely the Greek epic will come through.
Incomplete. The Deneaus chapter gets an incomplete. It’s eight pages too, which is way too short. Corben rushes the opening hook, which brings the Greek gods into the story, but then the main action is about the shitty prince and his shitty king dad. Corben pads around it a little, but the whole story is just their villainous banquet.
It doesn’t hurt the story, big picture-wise, but it does stall it out and bleed momentum all over the road. Some exquisite art on it too. Just not the story.
I once worried Shadows would be a “one good issue, one bad” situation. Now I hope there aren’t any more of these troubled issues before this wraps up.
Unsuccessful Shadows is still successful comics, of course, so the issue’s time reasonably well-spent.
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Tomb of Dracula (1972) #26
I’m not sure if this issue’s Marv Wolfman’s best Tomb, but it’s his most ambitious. He weaves the story—which involves a missing magical statue, a dead shop owner, Frank Drake and Taj being shitty dudes, a Kull-related flashback, and Dracula’s familiar, Shiela, meeting a British witch—through Old Testament verses. The shop owner’s Jewish, and his son (David, who seems like he’s going to recur even after next issue) is visiting him from a yeshiva. Just as the old man is about to complete his life’s work, some bad guys break in and kill him.
Dracula shows up a few minutes later at the active crime scene, wanting the statue and realizing the son’s got a piece of it. Dracula tasks Shiela with befriending David, and he takes her to see this old British witch who tells them about Kull. No editor’s notes with issue numbers, which was kind of disappointing. This statue can grant wishes—an Infinity Gauntlet you don’t need to snap—and Dracula wants it to… make himself immortal immortal, not vampire immortal. So he can still be evil but during the day.
David and Shiela are a nice couple. Like, Tomb of Dracula’s humans are usually obnoxious. Look at Frank Drake, who’s laying about since abandoning Rachel Van Helsing and the vampire hunters. It’s been three days since he left her—I swear this book has three different timelines going at once—and a sexy troubleshooter named Chastity Jones has tracked him down. She wants to give him a job being rich and fabulous again, plus she wants to get busy. Does he want to call Rachel (who he luvs, he said), or does he want to get horizontal?
So, immediately, David’s a bit more sympathetic a human character.
Oh, wait, then there’s Taj. He only gets a page because he’s not white; he’s moping around India because beating up his wife last issue or whatever didn’t make him feel better. Some old friend comes to plead with him to see her. So he beats that guy up too. Taj is a dick.
After spending the issue in the literal shadows, watching the humans do their things, Dracula gets into some trouble of his own while looking for the statue pieces, leading to a surprising cliffhanger. Though only because Dracula assumes he can’t possibly be in danger, but there wouldn’t be much of a comic without it.
It’s a strange combination of character study, mystical adventure, and Dracula. There are some bumps, but Gene Colan and Tom Palmer’s art is exquisite, and Wolfman’s working his buns off.
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Dan Dare (2007) #4
I’ve never read any Dan Dare besides this series. I assume it’s some British Silver Age book about British derring-do in a sci-fi setting. So I don’t know if writer Garth Ennis is doing some homage with the pacing of this issue or just the plotting of the series in general.
Here’s what the first issue promised: retired space adventurer Dan Dare coming back to save the galaxy (colonized by the British, natch) from the Mekon, his old enemy (and presumably the main villain in the original Dare comics).
So far, the series has delivered: a traitor Prime Minister, Dare, and sidekick Digby stranded on a hostile alien world full of monsters. No galaxy saving from Dan, just people saving.
In this issue, Ennis reveals that anti-whatever plotting is intentional and will continue. He leans heavily on using talking heads scenes to fill in the backstory. The issue opens with the Prime Minister and the Mekon, who’s a silly-looking fifties alien but terrifying in his brevity. He seems to have some psychic control over a sizeable percentage of the population (both aliens and humans, including the PM), but it’s unclear. You wouldn’t want to ask him.
Ennis splits the issue between the Mekon, the Home Secretary on Earth, as she uncovers the plot to sell out humanity, and Dan on the alien planet with the monsters. Things are getting grim for Dan, which is precisely where they’re supposed to be but also not. The plan needs Dan to be somewhere else; no one could predict he’d try to save some dumbass colonists because they haven’t read the old Dan Dare either.
It’s a fantastic mix of wild sci-fi, political thriller, and British colonial action, with one heck of a tense finale. Ennis and artist Gary Erskine deliver a dynamite (no pun) close to the first (informal) arc. Presumably, the series will reset itself going forward, though I also have no idea because Ennis is very unpredictable here. Delightfully so.
Erskine seems rushed at times—though the incredibly boring alien ships don’t help; hopefully, it doesn’t trend. Dan’d survive it just fine (even rushed, Erskine’s solid), but still. He’s got some very enthusiastic panels; the more, the better.
Dare’s a damn fine book.
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Werewolf by Night (1972) #23
Reading this issue, I kept having to remind myself writer Doug Moench doesn’t want Jack Russell to sound like a jackass, quite the opposite. Moench writes Jack’s narration as a combination of hard-boiled detective, beatnik, and, I don’t know, Charles Atlas advertisement text. It’s the purest obnoxious surfer bro Jack’s gotten in two dozen plus Werewolf comics, and, wow, does it get old fast.
The last issue ended with Jack under arrest for murder; this issue opens with him fighting the return villain—Atlas (a disfigured movie star out to kill all those who contributed to his accident)—but then flashes back to the cliffhanger resolve. The series’s new useless cop character interrogates Jack, Jack calls Buck for five grand (in seventies Marvel-616, the cops set bail), and then Buck fills Jack in on the villain’s origin.
After countless accessory or inappropriate appearances (with Jack’s seventeen-year-old sister), Buck finally becomes integral to the issue’s plot. He wrote the script for the movie where Atlas got hurt and can narrate the flashback-in-a-flashback to Jack, saving his involvement for the end. I’m not sure why Moench wanted to pace it that way, other than Atlas busting into the apartment like Kool-Aid Man would have an extra jolt.
But it doesn’t.
Neither does Jack’s background transformation to Wolfman Jack.
The fight then catches up to the opening splash page, where the werewolf and Atlas are fighting in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Atlas also kicks the werewolf’s ass, which raises questions about why Jack wants Buck to shoot him with a silver bullet if he can just be beaten to death.
The Don Perlin and Vince Colletta art is just as bewildering as the werewolf rules, with Colletta inking a lot of busy little lines. He’s not adding detail, just noise, and killing any implied movement in the artwork. It’s an ugly comic.
If Jack doesn’t get some humility soon, this book will be even more of a slog than I expected.
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Catwoman (2002) #2
Darwyn Cooke owns this issue. It begins with an action sequence: Catwoman breaking into Gotham PD to get a look at the autopsies on the dead streetwalkers. Cooke breaks each page into a dozen or two panels, sometimes splitting a horizontal frame, more often zooming in on one particular aspect of the action. All in his “cartoony” style. There’s never better movement in comic art than the first act of Catwoman #2. It’s a masterpiece.
And he doesn’t let up the rest of the issue ambition-wise. There’s Selina and Holly’s girl talk, done in art deco—to contrast the noir—and then the finale reveal. While Selina (and the reader) have heard about what the killer’s doing to the women and then read the reports, the finale shows the immediate aftermath, complete with the cops robbing the corpse.
Cooke’s superhero noir is a genre itself. Absolutely beautiful, superior work.
Ed Brubaker’s script is mostly successful. The Selina narration’s solid (and appropriately sparse at times), but he runs into a couple hiccups. First, obviously, Selina’s characterization of Batman in her narration is one of a dick—he’d care the women were dying, but they chose that life, didn’t they? Second, when Selina does decide she’ll be the one to stop the killings, it appears to only be after the finale and seeing the latest victim. The narration comes too late in the visuals.
Otherwise, the writing’s excellent. The issue has the lengthy action open, which slows down once Selina’s broken into the morgue, then the flashback to her and Holly’s conversation after last issue, then back to the present and the latest killing. Based on the initial pacing, they could’ve gotten away without having Selina arrive at the crime scene in time. The issue’d earned its two dollars and four bits by then, but Cooke and Brubaker somehow find time (and pages) to continue.
Though had they not paced it so well, that final narration fumble might’ve been avoided. But Catwoman’s inordinately rare faults being side effects of its great successes seems on par for the book.
It’s just too good for its own good.