Dave's Comicbook Capsules Et Cetera
Generally Monthly Picks and Pans of Comics and Related Media
Standard Disclaimers: Please set appropriate followups. Recommendation does not factor in price. Not all books will have arrived in your area this month. An archive can be found on my homepage,
http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/Rants
Rain is nice, but my lawn is too damp for the mowing it now needs.
Items of Note (strongly recommended or otherwise worthy): Nothing
Special vol 3
In this installment: Green Lantern (Guy Gardner) Action Figure, Doom Patrol Season 4, Beach WZRD #4, Sketches on the Sidewalk #1-2, Kaiju No. 8
vol 13, Magilumiere Magical Girls vol 8, Tank Chair vol 4, Shy vol 4, Isekai Samurai vol 1, Family Force V vol 1, DC Pride 2025, DC Pride Love and
Justice, Hex Vets vol 3-4, Nothing Special vol 3.
"Other Media" Capsules:
Things that are comics-related but not necessarily comics (i.e. comics-based movies like Iron Man or Hulk), or that aren't going to be available via comic shops (like comic pack-ins with DVDs) will go in this section when I have any to mention. They may not be as timely as comic reviews, especially if I decide to review novels that take me a week or two
(or ten) to get around to.
Green Lantern (Guy Gardner) Action Figure: DC/Spin Master - I was a bit surprised to see that the 6" scale figure line for this summer's Superman
movie was at the $10 price point, but still had pretty good articulation. I
am NOT surprised that the toy line gives away some of the stuff the trailers have been careful to avoid spilling, such as a few antagonists and a design
for one of the known characters. While McFarlane Toys has a lot of the DC
toy license stuff right now, and the 3" size multipacks do seem to be Page Punchers without a comic, this is Spin Master. This is a Build-A-Figure set, with the six figures in the wave having the parts to build Alan Tudyk's Robot
4 character (Superman gets the head, upper body, and cape of Robot 4, and he
is insanely longpacked...like, the first time I saw any of these on the peg
it was JUST Superman). Looks like 4's legs are both in shortpacked
characters, which I have yet to see on the shelf, but I do know someone who
got one of the more spoilery figures. Regarding Guy in particular, the
facial likeness is passable (the neutral expression really doesn't fit the character), as is the paint job (the ring really needed better and brighter paint). Restricted ball joint neck, and then hinge-and-swivel universal
joints for the shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees. No wrists, ankles, or waist. Hands are both in C-shaped grip poses, and yes he can hold 4's arm as
a bludgeon. The heels have 1/8" sockets for figure stand pegs. The eyes are printed on, so they're rather more detailed than the rest of things (and
they'd look really bad if even a little off-center, but mine is fine). I did later find and get Hawkgirl, much the same evaluation, although the molded
hair keeps the head from moving, and the wings were surprisingly not-horrible (praising with faint damnation). Overall, quite good for the size class, but if you're trying to avoid movie spoilers maybe don't go looking for the
figures yet. $9.99 at Target, $7.94 at Walmart.
Doom Patrol Season 4: DC/HBOMAXWHATEVER - Finally finished this. The
arc for this season involves Immortus, who is unrelated to the Silver Age DP foe General Immortus, but who IS connected to the longevity possessed by most of the members of this version of the Doom Patrol. Not the first season to involve a season-long struggle against a functional god, but it forces the
core team to face their mortality in a way that ACTUALLY DYING in a previous season didn't. While the end of S3 would have functioned as an acceptable series finale, getting this one more season really let the writers wrap up a lot of the personal arcs with a bit more finality. I really think how this season ended up justifies some of the rough patches of the series overall. Every bit of "they never learn, they're stuck making the same mistakes over
and over" finally pays off, because sometimes it just takes one more kick in the head. Or the butt. Or sometimes the butt is the head in this series. Appropriately, the whole season arc conflict wraps up in the first ten
minutes of the final episode, leaving the remaining forty or so minutes for some long goodbyes, slow and emotional moments as well as explosively
emotional moments. Sure, this means it's a bit of a handwavy deus ex
machina, but this Doom Patrol pretty much always stumbles backwards into solutions. The series becomes an extended examination about how in a world
of superhumans, not everyone with powers is really a hero or a villain. Some are just super broken, needing more than a normal lifetime to start putting
the pieces back together. Would the final episode have as much impact
without four seasons of dysfunctional superhuman fumbling about? Probably
not (well, maybe two seasons would've been enough in a pinch). Oh, and
there's a very good musical episode which has a well-justified reason to happen. Recommended. Price depends on format and store, series probably
still available on whatever HBO Max is called this week unless someone
decided to can it for a tax write-off.
Ironheart launched at the end of the month with three episodes at once, ouch, plus the back half on July 1. Expect that to be reviewed next month.
I'm kinda irked at all the bigots review-bombing it without actually watching it, so I'm inclined to like it out of spite if nothing else.
Digital Content:
Unless I find a really compelling reason to do so (such as a lack of regular comics), I won't be turning this into a webcomic review column.
Rather, stuff in this section will generally be full books available for reading online or for download, usually for pay. I will also occasionally include things I read on Library Pass (check to see if your public library gives access to it), although the interface can be laggy and freeze
sometimes.
Beach WZRD #4: itch.io/mcnostril.com - A few weeks after the issue
started serializing online, the whole thing went up for sale on McNostril's store. So I grabbed it. 68 pages long, so it's basically two regular
issues' worth of content with some linking material. The first half involves Melody trying to get the Wizard (who still hasn't offered up a name) to help with lifeguarding if she insists on keeping the lifeguard's chair as her "tower". This has...mixed results, as one might expect. Then, after a bit
of moping about how that went, Melody has to deal with an even more
mortifying experience: her big brother is coming to help. Big bro helps
flesh out some of the worldbuilding, but in the process really calls into question either the quality of Melody's education or how much attention she paid during it. While the series continues to mostly be broadly farcical in tone and plot, there's some touching character stuff in here too.
Recommended. $4 (or more if you tip).
Sketches on the Sidewalk #1: A Secret History of NYC's Jewish Comic Creators: Civics for All Comics Group (NYC Department of Education) - I don't regularly watch the CACG page, I really only see when it has new stuff by
Fred Van Lente, since he posts about it. So when he posted about #2 (below), that implied a #1 that I'd missed.
https://www.weteachnyc.org/resources/resource/sketches-on-the-sidewalk-1/ to get a free copy. After following Jess Nevins's "History of Comics in 500 Issues" podcast, I can't help but find this treatment pretty superficial and
a touch sanitized, but it's largely an issue of omitting unpleasant details rather than actively lying to make people look better. (I mean, if they
barely touch on how mobbed up early comics publishing was, they're sure not going to explain Gaiman's sins...although maybe he could've just been left
out entirely?) Paul Levitz wrote this, and provides numerous citations both
at the beginning and the end (if missing Jess entirely), while Joe Staton
drew it. It's a decent overview, and appropriate for the target audience of kids in school. Van Lente and Dunleavy's Comic Book History of Comics may
not have the tight focus on Jewish creators, but it does give a lot of the
same information with more of the "warts and all" elements, so if you found this free book interesting but want to know more, Comic Book History of
Comics is a good next step. If you want to know a truly massive amount more, check out Jess Nevins's Patreon. Mildly recommended. Free.
Sketches on the Sidewalk #2: Jack Kirby - Civics for All Comics Group
(NYC Department of Education) - There have been several biographical comics about Jack Kirby, but there's always room for more!
https://www.weteachnyc.org/resources/resource/sketches-on-the-sidewalk-2-jack-kirby/
for this one. The series title seems to come from Kirby's childhood, where
he would practice his art in chalk on the sidewalk or on the floors of
stairway landings because his family couldn't afford paper for art practice. Like #1, the history is a little cleaned up, but Kirby's life didn't need as much looking the other way beyond the mobbed up publishers thing that was the norm for the Golden Age. Because the focus is on one creator and those in
his immediate circle, Van Lente gets to write in more depth than the broad survey of #1, hopefully there will be additional issues that focus on single creators (Eisner seems a good candidate). Recommended. Free.
Expected next month: Let's be surprised together! Like, I wasn't expecting any of the things in this category that I read this month....
Manga Collections:
Most of these are "tankobon" or collections of work serialized in a
weekly or monthly publication, although some were written directly for the collection. All of them have been translated from Japanese (or maybe Korean, although I don't think I'm reading any manhwa) into English. Things with a manga aesthetic but done in English originally will go in one of the sections below as appropriate.
Kaiju No 8 vol 13: Viz/Shonen Jump - This is a gantlet. Kafka has to
get across several city blocks before Number 9 can assimilate his childhood friend Captain Ashiro. 9 has gone to a lot of effort to prevent this from happening as the big battle enters yet another volume. After several volumes of the protagonists barely managing to fight back against numbered kaiju tailored to defeat them, vol 12 ended with the appearance of a truly insane number of daikaiju...like finally beating a game boss only to have their
health bar refill and get joined by five more bars the same size.
Fortunately, that was just the author having gotten the hang of setting up cliffhangers for the tankobon, and this volume is full of stuff going humanity's way, turning despair into faint glimmers of hope. Of course, as usual for this series, there's occasional flashback sequences when a
character comes on the scene with a new powerup, not so much to explain how they got the power as to explore their deeper background and the reason they willingly throw themselves into combat with monsters. Recommended. $11.99/$15.99Cn/#8.99UK, rated Teen.
Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. vol 8: Viz Signature - While it's been clear for a while that the real enemy is Capitalism, this volume puts names
and faces on the specific people behind the looming Kaii mutation crisis,
while also establishing who's been an informed participant and who's just
been another pawn. After a little wrap-up from the shrine story last volume, this one focuses on MMGI learning of the next stage of the plot, the reasons behind it, and planning how to cut it off at the pass. It does get a little scattered in the reading, I think Sekka Iwata was trying to pull together a
few too many plot threads without dropping any of the ones from vol 7, and things don't stay on any one character for very long. Next volume may well
be an extended fight scene as nothing goes as planned for anyone at all
except maybe the bishy guy from last volume (who I thought was a lady at the time) who seems to be mostly about chaos. Recommended. $14.99/$19.99Cn/#10.99UK, rated Teen.
Tank Chair vol 4: Kodansha - So, the title character's demise in vol 3 followed by a time skip left me wondering what would happen next...and what happens next is a flashback to several years before Nagi and his sister fled the Academy. This does allow some extra camera time for other characters who didn't survive vol 3, but the main purpose is to introduce a new character
who knew Nagi back before his Tank Chair days. A secondary purpose is to provide a possible retcon regarding how Nagi could be so badass and still end up paralyzed...which feels kind of like backfill after some pantsing by the writer. If there's an overarching theme, it's "how do severely emotionally stunted people raised only to be killers deal with emotions like love, be it familial or romantic?" Still no real answers to how the world got into such
a crappy situation, but that doesn't really feel like the kind of question
the author intends to address unless it's just a side effect of Sensei's immortal quest to create another like himself. On the high end of mildly recommended. $13.99/$18.99Cn, rated Older Teen 16+
Shy vol 4: Yen Press - While the main conflict in this volume centers on Spirit, it's also Shy's first real "break out" where she shows she really has what it takes to be a hero when the energy blasts start flying. It's much
the same as the virtues she's shown in previous volumes, but she finally believes in herself enough that her heart is expressed in her powers...which
is pretty much how powers work in this universe. Beyond that, though, the climax of the story and its aftermath are an examination of how fundamentally broken a hero often is. Denial of one's own needs in order to exist through service can easily be twisted to villainous ends, as happened with Spirit's mirror opponent. Generational lessons in "I only have value to others" can make you a hero, as happened to Spirit, but they can also just plain break someone. After the big story is done, there's a couple of disconnected short pieces, and in one of them it's clear that Shy herself didn't really absorb
the "you can't just live for others" lesson from the Russia arc. A little
more of her backstory comes out in the process, though. The last chapter in this volume sets up the next longer arc, with a mysterious young woman who doesn't appear to be connected to heroes or villains but is definitely not a normal girl nonetheless. Overall, this volume continues to reinforce my feeling that Bukimi Miki is relatively inexperienced and was not really planning things out for stuff like tankobon collections, very much a
"pantser" in terms of plotting. There's overall themes, largely tied to following your heart and knowing your own heart and those of others, but the plot itself is still firming up at this point. Still, despite the uneven
bits, there's some strong thematic scenes. Recommended. $13.00/$17.00Cn
rated Teen LV (but as noted last month, there doesn't seem to be any actual strong language in the English translation, unless you consider "natto" to be
a foul word.)
Isekai Samurai vol 1: Yen Press - Okay, this one lets you know right in the title what subgenre it wants to be part of. And if you've been reading
my reviews for the last few years, you'll know I do read a fair number of "Isekai" in part because they're pretty popular and therefore easy to find lately. But what is an isekai anyway? Here's a brief (hopefully)
explanation from my POV before I get into the meat of this particular sample. Isekai literally just means any story in which the protagonist is in "another world" (which is the meaning of the word isekai, as helpfully explained in
the appendix of this volume). That's pretty broad, and could include mundane travelogues, so it's generally restricted to situations where there's
something fantastical about how the protagonist got there. Prior to the current surge of isekai stories, the most common form of this is the "portal fantasy," in which the protagonist is physically transported somewhere else. Maybe there's a literal portal, perhaps with "Be Sure" inscribed on it, or maybe it's a tornado or an explosion or just staring at Mars really hard.
But the character is basically themself in Oz, or on Mars, or in King
Arthur's Court. They might have some sort of unusual abilities related to a plot device or the nature of the world (any reasonably fit human on Mars
could do the sorts of things John Carter does, much like for a while Superman was explained as being native to a heavier-gravity world, possibly inspired
by John), but they have continuity of self. (Richard Corben's Den is
massively transformed, but again this seems to be just a thing that happens
to humans.) While there are still some portal fantasy stories in the current crop of isekai (Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear, to pick an example from my reading
list), most of them go with an alternative: reincarnation. Where a portal might go both ways, with Dorothy returning to Kansas between adventures, or
the D&D kids fruitlessly searching for a way home, reincarnation is generally considered to be one-way. Often the protagonist is shown dying at the start
of the story (rarely being hit by a truck, despite the cliche), although sometimes they just fall asleep and then wake up in a new life (e.g. Rei in
I'm In Love With The Villainess). Now, as to the protagonist of this particular story, she doesn't die...which is the PROBLEM. She's a hardcore samurai who longs to die in battle, but she keeps surviving, and the wars are winding down in 1600AD when she's from. So she prays to Buddha in a temple
of reincarnation...and is just sort of moved to another world. Portal
fantasy of the "a god decided to put me in this world and skip the dying
part" variety like Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear. (I think the translator missed an opportunity by not having her react to being transported into the middle of a fantasy world battle with, "Oh joy! A FRAY!" though.) While the portal fantasy part is a bit unusual, and the "already a warrior in feudal Japan rather than a modern-day schlub" thing is very unusual, they do stick with
the cliche by having this new world being basically a LitRPG fantasy game world, with things like B-rank monsters and the like. Of course, Ginko Tsukitsuba (Silver Moon-sword guard, roughly) is also not the typical genre-savvy LitRPG isekai protagonist, so her reactions are refreshingly different from the usual...if also VERY fight-happy. She is ecstatic to find out that "Heroes" exist who can defeat any of the monsters she's already
faced, because maybe one of THEM can kill her in a fair fight! Yeah, Ginko's whole gag does risk wearing thin, which makes supporting cast important.
(And to be fair, Groo's still around after more than a generation at this point, and his gag STARTED thin, deliberately.) Part of the supporting cast
is a sexy foul-mouthed elf nun who runs an orphanage and appears to be a retired Hero. I dunno how long this premise can go without wearing out its welcome, but I definitely enjoyed this first installment, and laughed out
loud several times. My sense of humor is a touch skewed, of course, so your mileage may vary. Recommended. $14.00/$18.00Cn, Rated Older Teen LNV (LOTS
of violence, most of the language comes from the nun, and so does all of the very mild nudity)
Expected next month: Easygoing Territory Defense vol 5, Ultraman: Along Came A Spider-Man vol 1, After God vol 5. Gunsmith Cats Omnibus vol 2 is due the very end of July and there's no way I'm getting it read before the end of the month. I'll probably read another volume or two of Shy, and there's a title or to I might pick up if I see them on the shelf and like what I see,
as usual.
Other Trades:
Trade paperbacks, collections, graphic novels, whatever. If it's bigger than a "floppy" but not Manga, it goes here.
Family Force V vol 1: Image/Skybound - I listed this last month as
coming in the manga section, but it turns out this is purely American, just
in the Tokusatsu mold. It's written by Matt Brady, creator of Amphibia, so it's not too surprising that it's got pull quotes from ND Stevenson, Dana Terrace, Rebecca Sugar, Jeff Smith, and Alex Hirsch...practically a who's who of animators Tumblr loves (plus Jeff Smith). The premise of this is similar
to Mr. Villain's Day Off, where being a Ranger is a family affair and the
fight against the alien invaders has been going on long enough for all the original Rangers to have grown or nearly-grown children. However, unlike the "power passes to offspring" deal, the Moon Troopers are an ever-expanding family business, with the original Moon Troopers having spread out across the world and recruited new heroes...and all of their children are going to be
Moon Troopers whether they like it or not. And boy howdy does the
protagonist NOT. The ethics of this are only very lightly touched on,
although by the end of the volume the reader gets to peek behind the curtain
a bit and see why ethics aren't a big concern. Meanwhile, loads and loads of Secret Identity Hassles, something I tend to not care for in my super sentai stories. While a lot of this volume is devoted to setting up longer arcs,
both large scale and personal scale, the core plot of this story is the protagonist (Maise Shiraki) trying to Refuse The Call and then getting the inevitable personal tragedy that makes her come to embrace her role after
all. It's okay, if wallowing in cliches, and there's not one but two "the heroes might not be working for the right side" elements that may or may not
be connected. I'll give it another volume's worth, whenever it comes out
(not listed for pre-order anywhere I've checked), but there's a lot of places where it could dive off my reading list. Mildly recommended. $16.99, rated 12+.
DC Pride 2025: DC - I suppose this could be considered a floppy, but at
96 pages and ten bucks, I'm gonna drop it in trades. Unlike the purely anthology format used in previous DC Pride specials, this ties everything together in a framing story that starts at a long-lived gay bar frequented by superhumans and how all of that mystic energy and emotion can get tied up
into something that refuses to go gently into demolition. It's still an anthology in the sense that it has interweaving stories set within the
overall frame, and a multitude of artists, but it's ultimately an origin
story for a character who may or may not appear outside of Pride Specials. (Aside: the genderless Stitch, who seems to be a sort of successor to Ragman
or something, introducing themself with "WHATTUP, QUILTBAGS?!" was very
clever. If anyone is going to use that less common acronym, it's a walking quilt.) Anyway, while I didn't recognize a lot of these characters, and many were basically just carrying spears on stage, the connected stories generally worked well. There's a theme throughout both overt and underlying of "when
old wishes come true later on, will you still want them?" The answer is
often no, because the one making the wish has grown and changed since then,
but not always...because some things unfortunately don't change fast enough. After the main story is the real reason I picked this up in the first place,
an autobiographical comic by Jenny Blake, who you may know better under her previous name (which she is still willing to use professionally where relevant), Tony Isabella. This sort of dip into the real world is something
a special like this really needs, because it's not just the characters who represent Pride, it's the people behind the characters. Recommended. $9.99
DC Price: Love and Justice: DC - This hardcover collects the various
Pride specials from previous years (2018, 2019, and 2021). Why am I
reviewing this after the 2025 book? Because I decided to order this after reading the 2025 one, since the framing story of the 2025 one references one
of the books in this set. Annoyingly, the story in this collection only
shares a location with the framing sequence of DC Pride 2025, and doesn't address the pseudo-antagonist, so I remain unenlightened. Even leaving that point aside, though, this was a bit disappointing. A collection of anthologies, none of which had a theme beyond "Pride Month," and with a lot
of variation in both story and art quality. Maybe take the best third of
them and you could generate one solid special. Part of the problem, which is shared by the superior 2025 special, is that with so many characters crammed in, very few of them got enough development or even establishment to give a casual reader reason to care. Again, that top one third is mostly the ones that didn't assume that the reader knew who these people were...a Pride
Special is the sort of thing that should be reaching out to people who aren't already buying your comics, DC. Additionally, this lacks any of the "real people stories" like Jenny's above, or the Kevin Conroy piece I guess was
from a book not collected in this hardcover. It may not be fair, but I'm probably always going to be comparing a superhero Pride special to Gay Comics #25, their superhero issue...which mixed stories about fictional characters with autobiographical pieces. Sure, the art wasn't as polished, but there
was plenty of heart. This collection does have heart, but it's kinda spread out. Mildly recommended. $19.99/$25.99Cn (hardcover)
Hex Vet vol 3-4: Kaboom! - When the creator announced volume 4 on
BlueSky this month, my reply was, "Huh, I didn't notice vol 3 coming out."
Her reply to that was, "I am very good at self-promotion." Of course, next year someone else will be promoting it, because there's a Nickelodeon cartoon based on the series launching in 2026. Unfortunately, the previews I've seen have the most painfully generic big-head CG designs possible, absolutely none of the charm of Sam Davies's art. Ah well, I hope she got paid a decent
amount for this. Volume 3 is The River Guardian, where a crisis in
confidence leads to an investigation into the magical version of industrial waste. Once the protagonists track down the problem, they get a clue
regarding the mysterious beast sightings that have been going on in the background. Volume 4, The Night Tunnels, resolves the mysterious beast plot and ends the initial arc. The general tone is cozy with occasional creepy
bits or "scary but it turns out okay" elements. There's no Big Cosmic Threat lurking out there, but sometimes it feels to the characters like there might be, because when you're inside the story it can be hard to figure out how big it really is. The stakes are significant, but local and personal. (Oh, and it's finally made clear, to me at least, that Clarian is a guy. The name's a bit ambiguous, and his features are a lot softer than those of definitely
male Nurse Ariel.) Recommended. $10.99/$14.99Cn each, all-ages.
Nothing Special vol 3: Webtoon/Ten Speed Graphic - Thus ends the
"Declan's Family" arc, leading into the far longer and not yet complete "Lasser's Family" arc. Actually, in some way, Lasser's Family is all over
the entire series, but to be fair there are rather a lot of them. Speaking
of families, Declan's arc gets away from the specific "Moms Are Scary" theme, but does retain a healthy respect of and fear of older female relatives in general (don't worry, Lasser's mom might be even more scary than Callie's
mom). This is also the volume where Tansy became my favorite character.
She's not anyone's mom (yet), but she's hot and scary in her own way. As in previous volumes, this isn't just taking the infinite canvas strip and
chopping it into pages, Cook adds a bunch of new side stuff in the margins (kind of like how Sergio Aragones did in Mad Magazine, but with more plant ghosts). This does mean that sometimes there's bits in the collection that
are more recently topical than would have been possible in the original
strip, as they refer to things that hadn't happened yet when the strip in question was published. Definitely value for your money and time, not just a way to support the creator. Anyway, once again capitalism is the enemy, but since it's hard to have a big fight scene against an economic principle, there's a specific capitalist devil available to punch. Strongly
recommended. $22.99/$30.99 (softcover, there's also a hardcover), 380
pages.
Expected next month: The Mighty Onion vol 2
Floppies:
No, I don't have any particular disdain for the monthlies, but they
*are* floppy, yes? (And not all of them come out monthly, or on a regular schedule in general, so I can't just call this section "Monthlies" or even "Periodicals" as that implies a regular period.)
This month was kinda borderline, there was almost enough to justify a shipment mid-month, but I decided to wait another week, so the rest of May
and most of June (not gonna wait one more week for just a single book coming
in for me at the end of June) will show up in next month's column.
Expected next time: Fantastic Four #32 (and probably #33), Gatchaman #9-10, Gatchaman: Only One Earth #4 (of 4), Marvel Knights: the World to Come #1, Moon Knight Fist of Khonshu #8-9, Star Trek Lower Decks #7-8, Vampirella #2-3. Maybe a couple more.
Dave Van Domelen, "It wasn't cool of me to force all of humanity to love me...I'm not Disney." - Immortus, Doom Patrol S4
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)