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The Legion of Monsters (1975) #1
Legion of Monsters opens with a defensive letter from editor Tony Isabella, responding to the Marvel faithful who were mad at the inglorious cancellation of the other black and white magazines. Isabella explains the books weren’t ever losing money; it’s just not in Marvel’s best interest not to make money. If readers really want black-and-white monster magazines, they better buy Legion.
They did not.
Although there’s a subscription form in the issue, Monsters only had this one issue.
And kind of for good reason.
There are four features. One Monster of Frankenstein, one continuation from Dracula Lives, and two original horror stories. All of them are uneven, starting with Doug Moench, Val Mayerik, Pablo Marcos, and Dan Adkins’s Frankenstein story. It’s after the Monster has woken up in the modern age, and he’s wandering around. He sees a princess, and even though he knows it always ends with villagers and pitchforks, he follows her.
Now, if it were just about the Monster following some girl, it’d be tired fast. But the Monster finds himself amid intrigue; it’s a costume party, and the jester tells him someone’s out to kill the princess, will the Monster help? Of course, he will. But will it be helpful help or disastrous?
The art’s sometimes excellent. Mayerik inking himself, Marcos inking Mayerik, it works out. The Adkins inks are wanting. And the story’s really dang long.
But at least it’s not the Secret Origin of Manphibian, the following story. Tony Isabella scripts from a Marv Wolfman plot. Dave Cockrum pencils, Sam Grainger inks. It’s about a Creature from the Black Lagoon type coming up through an oil well and getting in a fight with another monster from the same species, as well as some husband out to kill his wealthy wife. Or something.
It’s tedious. Maybe if the art were more distinct.
Ditto the next story, about kids picking on a former circus “freak” whose only friends are flies. It bleeds empathy, but the story’s way too long, and the art lacks Paul Kitchener pencils, Ralph Reese inks. They also share story credit with scripter Gerry Conway.
Maybe if Marvel wanted more people to be excited about Legion, they should’ve gotten together a better first issue.
The next chapter in Roy Thomas and Dick Giordano’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula wraps up the issue. After a lengthy (and welcome) recap of events to date, this installment covers Mina going off to marry Jonathan in Europe while Lucy’s condition worsens in England. There are multiple diary and journal keepers: Mina, Steward, and eventually Lucy.
It sure seems like Lucy has no idea she’s been Dracula’s steady blood bag for months, and, to this point, Mina hasn’t read Jonathan’s diary, even though he wants her to do so. But what Thomas doesn’t fix—and Giordano doesn’t help with—is Dr. Van Helsing, who arrives this issue to commit medical malpractice.
With the timeline visually broken out so nicely, it’s even more apparent than usual Van Helsing messes up with Lucy’s initial diagnosis and then waits too long to tell everyone what they’re dealing with.
Giordano draws Van Helsing like a combination of Santa Claus and a leprechaun.
Otherwise, lots of good art, but Lucy’s the only sympathetic character, with Seward whining almost nonstop about her marrying someone else and Van Helsing blandly kind and incompetent.
There’s one page of single-panel strips from Stuart Schwartzberg. They’re a highlight and shouldn’t be. There’s also another text article recapping monsters in other media, like it’s a real magazine again. Too little, too late.
Is it a bummer Legion didn’t continue? Sure?
But it makes sense why it didn’t.
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My Life Is Murder (2019) s03e06 – Bride to Bee
Last episode, we found out Lucy Lawless’s fashionable curmudgeon (her costumes are phenomenal this season) hated Christmas. This episode, we open with her hating on summer. To cheer her up—after a muted flirtation about being on an ice cream date—copper Rawiri Jobe gives her a case: a bride dying at her own wedding, allergic to bees, and stung.
Rich kid groom Reef Ireland is convinced his dad, Stephen Lovatt, killed his fiancée. She’s the only one who made it to the aisle; all his other girlfriends took a payoff. In addition to Lovatt, who screams guilty, there’s Shavaughn Ruakere as the suspicious wedding planner and Jaime McDermott as one of Ireland’s exes, who appears to still be in the picture. Olivia Tennet plays the victim’s business partner, who’s tried to save her but someone tampered with the EpiPen. It’s a tight mystery—script by Jodie Malloy and Paul Jenner—with some amusing investigation scenes, particularly for Ebony Vagulans and Tatum Warren-Ngata.
Warren-Ngata still isn’t much of a character with Vagulans around, but—once again—no one’s much of a character this season, no one except Lawless. The two sidekicks go off and have an adventure, leaving Lawless to interview Lovatt and Ruakere multiple times, and it works out… it’s just different. It’s not really an ensemble, but since Lawless doesn’t hang out with the sidekicks outside the occasional coffee or apartment-based scene, it feels a lot more like one.
We also get a lot more character development for Lawless, who bonds with groom Ireland, talking about her own wedding and giving some long-delayed backstory. But to an absolute stranger and non-recurring guest star; in other words, while the audience is getting to know Lawless’s character better, the other characters are not. It’s a shift.
So while everyone does get good material, they rarely get it in the same scene as one another. It almost feels more like a Covid season than the previous one. This season’s only got four more episodes, and even though there’s been Vagulans’s mystery trip and some other threads, it doesn’t seem like there’s going to be a season arc. With more character moments for Lawless than usual.
We’ll see.
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Shadows on the Grave (2016) #2
Shadows on the Grave #2 is not a bad comic, but it does show how far down I’ll follow creator Richard Corben without batting an eye.
Once again, Corbin’s got multiple done-in-ones, then a chapter in his Greek epic. If it weren’t for the Greek epic featuring a cyclops eating a bunch of soldiers, it’d be a talking heads story. But, damn, can Corben draw a rampaging cyclops. It’s also incredibly confusing since there’s no real recap of the previous entry; I’d forgotten it was all about some Greek hero who needed to get out of town. I thought it was all about the cyclops.
I’d be very curious to read the story on its own, not the fourth entry in every issue in an anthology. Especially if there aren’t any recaps.
The first three stories are all fifties or sixties-era stories set in the very rural South. Not connected, of course, but fertile ground for horror comics. They just go on a little long. Every story runs eight pages; for the three horror stories, it feels like Corben’s trying the vamp a couple of pages away. The Greek chapter? He needs at least another couple pages, if not all six he’d get from cutting down the horror stories.
The first and third stories are the most successful, with both having a nephew robbing a rich aunt. The first, the aunt’s alive, and the would-be robber is bringing along his girlfriend to do the deed, his brother presumably around trying to do the same thing. They go out to the aunt’s house in the woods, and strange, horrible things happen with little explanation. Corben races to get to the murderous intent section but then drags the rest of the story.
Beautiful art, though.
The second story’s the least successful. Some kid follows his uncle into the swamp, where the uncle has a strange, horrible experience, then the nephew has a strange, horrible experience, and nothing gets explained at the end. Corben goes for haunting and doesn’t pull it off, making it one of his least successful stories… ever. Corben always pulls it off.
The third story’s the best, just because the setting’s excellent. This time the robber nephew–a different one, obviously; the first story’s robber nephew was a beatnik or at least adjacent, this robber nephew’s a greaser—this time, he’s robbing a corpse. He just can’t find his way around the graves, so he asks an old mourner lady for help and, damn, if he doesn’t want to rob her too. The graveyard’s phenomenal.
Then there’s the Greek epic chapter, with the hero starting his quest with some ominous foreshadowing. Or possibly a cliffhanger tragedy; it’s unfortunately hard to tell because Corben does a montage on the last page without establishing what’s changing. Other than the lighting.
So also not successful. But Corben does have the cyclops kicking ass, so it more than covers.
Corben was seventy-seven when this book originally came out, so he gets all sorts of passes, but still. I was expecting Grave to be great start to finish; I hope he gets his groove back next issue.
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Red Room: Trigger Warnings (2022) #2
I don’t think I’ve cringed as much during a Red Room since the first issue. Maybe it should’ve come with a Trigger Warning–wokka wokka.
But, no, it’s more just the relentlessness of the Red Room footage. Creator Ed Piskor once again splits up the pages; in the top left, he’s got a suicide note from a couple late teens Red Roomers; it’s all text on a smartphone. The issue opens with the cops finding their hanging bodies. They’ve killed themselves, unable to keep running from the police.
So top left, there’s the Notes.app suicide note and manifesto, then the rest of the page is the teenagers’ story. It’s a classic boy meets girl story; they’re high school seniors, he’s already dealing for someone tangentially Red Room-related, and she’s always been curious about snuff movies. When they happen to see some guy murdered for stealing his girlfriend’s husband’s comic books (Piskor geeks out this issue, including a great-looking Spidey head), the boy realizes the girl’s a kindred psychopath.
They don’t go straight to YouTube snuff movies; they escalate as they try to escape a bad situation. Until that point, the “philosophy” of the note matches the action close enough, but then Piskor starts to explore the cracks. There are disconnects between the two narratives, and they keep growing.
The reveal isn’t unpredictable; Piskor goes out of his way to forecast it, as he makes his protagonists more sympathetic than usual. They’re just psychopaths in a bad situation. Better luck of parentage, and they’d be cops or lawyers.
Now, once their Red Room careers start, Piskor does their videos in the center of the page, and it’s the most intense the comic’s been in ages. What’s so good about it is how Piskor’s controlling that intensity. He’s using it to jiggle the narrative impact, page after page. It’s excellent comics.
Red Room’s something else.
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Infinity 8: Volume Four: Symbolic Guerilla (2018)
Symbolic Guerilla is my favorite Infinity 8 so far. I’ve read this one before, but not while going through the series, so I couldn’t really compare. Now, I can. It’s for two obvious reasons: protagonist Patty Stardust is the best agent so far, and Martin Trystram’s art is fascinating.
Unlike the previous stories, there are significant flashback sequences, contrasting Trystram’s Infinity 8 setting and his general sci-fi vibes. But also with very delicate line work. Trystram’s imaginative and enthusiastic but very precise with the lines. His style clashes with the content to encourage the reader to spend more time on the panels, which means experiencing the excellent art more.
And then there’s Patty. She’s living as a Black woman in the far-flung future after the destruction of planet Earth. However, everyone still wants to touch her hair, including the Muppet-like alien influencer she’s babysitting at the beginning of the volume. What also makes Patty unique is it’s not her first appearance in the book; she showed up in the Hitler book. She’s a stage manager for some hippy-dippy performance artist cultists, and they went to join up with Hitler because no one in the future remembers what Hitler did, but then he kills Patty for being Black, revealing the reality of the situation. So Patty’s singular in the series.
Though there is another agent cameo at the end of this volume, so more she’s been singular to this point. And she’s got a whole, real arc because she’s got a supporting cast and a relevant backstory. She’s undercover trying to bust the cult’s business connect; in addition to the state manager gig, she’s dating the cult leader’s son, Peter. It’s not romantic for Patty, just a way to dodge leader Ron’s sexual advances.
When the ship captain and the first officer (who again is flirting, meaning he did sit out the fundamentalist lady) call on her to investigate the space graveyard, she’s busy with the Muppet-y influencer who wants to vlog all about the cult’s next art event. The boyfriend’s tripping and needy, so it’s a terrible time for her to have to go off ship.
Especially when it turns out the cult leader has chipped his entourage so he can track them at all times. Patty’s worried about getting busted for being an undercover agent—going to the space graveyard is the first time she’s broken cover in five years—but it turns out to be much, much worse because Ron realizes they’re stopped and in a bitching space graveyard. It’s the perfect location for their next show.
Writers Lewis Trondheim and Kris do a great job with Patty, the first agent with this kind of stakes and agency. Of the three previous, two have been keeping secrets and unreliable, and one was just living an action-adventure. Since the cult’s all very sixties retro, it’s a suspense comedy sci-fi action story. It’s wild. And the writing’s not just good on Patty; Ron goes from being a petty annoyance to profoundly dangerous.
Patty’s also got the flashbacks thing going on. She’s haunted by her past as an agent, the aforementioned trip away from the ship, and that character development gets wrapped into this time-bending mission to explore a space graveyard. While Trondheim and Kris don’t offer any more tidbits about Earth’s destruction, they get into the bigger ground situation. Building off the last arc’s history lesson, Patty makes an otherwise unknowable historical discovery while exploring; the script weaves it into her character arc. It’s so cool.
Symbolic Guerilla ends the first half of Infinity 8 on its highest point. I imagine there will be better stories, but I’m not sure I’ll ever dig anyone’s art as much as Trystram’s. Looking at it is just so much fun.
But it also occurs to me, having now read the first half in sequence, Trondheim and Kris haven’t revealed anything about where Infinity 8 is going, not in terms of plot details or narrative. There are going to be four more volumes, four more agents, and four more timelines, but the possibilities are….
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