Number 74 - Dial H - China Mieville & Mateus Santolouco

 

A China Mieville book I never knew existed.

This was a short lived reboot of a silver age character during the New 52 era at DC comics.

Fat schlub Nelson Jent is not a hero in any sense of the word.  However, when he stumbles on a friend being attacked and tries to dial for help on an old payphone, he's transformed into Boy Chimney- a frankly terrifying warrior for the forces of good.

It's a short lived change and he finds himself back to his usual shape after dispatching the bad guys. Next time he dials he becomes Captain Lachrymose...

He discovers that any time he dials the word HERO on the old phone, he transforms into a random hero, sometimes with great powers, sometimes not quite so great. He also runs into another dial user who calls herself Manteau and wears a mask over her various manifestations.

When not superheroing with her dial, she's actually a little old woman.

The scene is set for one of the weirder products of the DC factory.

The fact that the two leads are an elderly woman and a fat slob is more than a little refreshing. The storylines are surreal to say the least. The first big villain they fight has powers over nothingness. Another villain has the ability to manifest his past and immediate future selves which leads to some of the most remarkable artwork concepts I've seen in comics.

China Mieville's script starts off very sharp and occasionally hilariously funny, but the final issues seem to lose the focus somewhat.  it could be that he had to wrap things up faster than intended and the the ending is somewhat confusing and extremely meta. 

The artwork is remarkable throughout and perfectly complements the weirdness of Mieville's concepts.

I know nothing about the original Dial H comics except that they were apparently just a goofy excuse to create the weirdest superpowers they could without having to create permanent storylines around them. Mieville, in the second half of the book, creates a history and explanations for the Dials and how and why they work- also throwing in more than one type of dial for that extra bit of variety.

It's a fun way to kill an hour or two and the artwork bears up to close inspection and is worth the cost of the book all by itself. If it gets a bit silly near the end, that's forgivable. 

Number 39 - Incursion - Alex Paknadel et al

 This was cheap, and has a pretty cool looking cover which is the entire reason I bought it.  I had no knowledge of this title or any of the characters.

Anyhoo... 

It transpires that I'm so out of touch with the comics world that i didn't know that Valiant is a third comics empire, competing with the big two (Marvel and DC) with it's own set of ongoing series and heroes.

They seem to have a more fantasy based mythos, as opposed to the more sci-fi trappings of most superhero faire.  This title is a big crossover event in the Valiant universe, pulling together several of their main characters into one story, an Avengers Assemble type of thing. Even the aliens in the opening pages look somewhat like the Kree.

This would all probably excite me much more if I was a follower of the comics in question.  However, as a casual reader encountering this universe for the first time, I feel some of the finer points of the story were probably lost on me.

The story follows a threat to the existence of life on planet earth when a creature from another world infects the Geomancer - a young girl linked inextricably to life itself. the creature has made a mistake because the girl is protected by an eternal champion who makes it his mission to save her by any means necessary.  The writing does a fair job in letting us know who each of these characters is.  At no point did I find myself wondering what was going on. 

It's all beautifully illustrated and inked.  Visually this is a remarkable piece of work.  The story is possibly less impressive. We're in very familiar territory here.  I know there are very few original stories out there, but at least try to dress your plot in unfamiliar clothes. 

It was entertaining.  It killed 45 minutes yesterday. Kudos to the art team for a great job. Otherwise it's a bit same old, same old. It's not entirely cliched, but I can't award it anything for originality either.

Number 7 - Nemesis - Millar & McNiven

 

Mark Millar has one hell of a CV in the comics world.  He's written for all the major superheroes in Marvel and DC. He wrote the Old Man Logan series for Wolverine that was turned into the most interesting Marvel film to date  He also wrote the Kickass comics and Kingsman.

Slightly less well known is this one - mainly because it hasn't been filmed yet. 

Gratuitously violent, and necessarily so, this type of story works best taken to excess like this. 

Nemesis is the world's greatest supervillain. Born to ultra-rich parents, he uses his wealth to gather the best gadgets and career criminals to help his rampages. In the first pages alone his death toll is probably in the thousands. And he's never been caught. Supervillainy doesn't come much mor supervillainy.

Pitted against him is super cop Blake Morrow. He's never failed to take down a perp and now nemesis has set his sights on Washington DC, the city under his protection.

The scene is set for a gloriously OTT ultra-violent confrontation.

There's no subtlety of characterisation.   There's no deep hidden meanings.  This is good old fashioned action storytelling. 

McNiven's art is perfectly suited to the story, sleek and gory with no detail missed.

There's not much more to say about it.  It's a great fun read, funny and shocking in equal amounts. As good fun ways to kill a spare hour go, this is pretty hard to beat.

Number 40 - Big Lizard - Joe & Keith Lansdale

 

Looking back to when I started this blog, I'm surprised I've not reviewed a Joe R Lansdale book yet.  He's one of those authors who's so prolific it's pointless trying to catch up, so I try to get through one or two of his a year, in which time he puts out at least three.  He's like Stephen King in that regard.

He's also like Stephen King in that, despite an enormously large output, his quality never seems to dip. In fact he's a slight improvement on King in that regard since there are at least two King novels I don't want to read again, whereas, given the time, I would happily reread everything I've read by Lansdale.

This book is two Lansdale's for the price of one. Keith is Joe's son and has recently taken up the mantle on the Red Range comics/graphic novels created by his dad many moons ago.

Big Lizard is a superhero story with a difference.  A lot of differences.  A fuck ton of difference.

Buster Nix takes on a job as night security for Pick a Chicken, a local chicken joint where the patrons can, erm... pick their own chickens for their dinner, in much the same way as seafood places allow patrons to pick their own lobster from a tank.  In Pick-a-Chicken they can even despatch their own chicken with a company hatchet before it is cooked. 

He stumbles onto a satanic ritual in an outbuilding a few days into the job and knocks over a blazing brazier, disrupting the service and letting all kinds of hell  loose.  As a result of the botched ritual, he finds he has the ability to transform into a Big Lizard (about 8 foot nose to tail). 

The owner of the business, Elroy Cuzzins has been similarly transformed by the ritual and has become Big Chicken.  He is hell-bent on completing the ritual, which means killing several people, and it's up to Big Lizard and his friends, a teenage tech wizard and a normal sized but psychic talking chicken called Socrates, to stop Big Chicken in his tracks.

All in all this is as mad as a box of frogs.  There's some very strange but effective visual imagery going on in this book, as well as at least one point where you'll feel real sympathy for Buster.

This book is not going to win any Pulitzer prizes. it's way too much fun for that.  This is probably the funniest book I've read all year.  This is the sort of book to chill out and have a blast with.  And it does that just fine. I laughed out loud several times reading this.  There's no real poetry to the writing, but who needs poetry when you've got an 8 foot chicken on a killing spree?

There are even a few dangling plot threads for a potential sequel to pick up on.  I sincerely hope they're considering it. 

This is released in September this year from SST Publications.

https://sstpublications.co.uk/

Edited to Add

The version of this book that I read was the ARC, pictured above.  I've just recently (aka today) acquired a copy of the full end product complete with illustrations.

It's a gorgeous piece of work.  The illustrations are just as mad as the story. The binding and formatting is spot on.  It's one of those books where the quality of the paper used is so nice it's worthy of a mention.  So I'll mention it.  Even the quality of the paper is noticeably better than most books.

It's signed by Joe and Keith on one of the nicest looking signature pages I've seen (complete with its own set of illustrations). And all this for a lot less than most small presses charge for a high quality signed limited edition.

You need this book in your lives.  It will improve your entire existence. That is no word of a lie.