comickal: recently read, the naked, the dead and the nipply edition
Reviews bookended by stories about some interesting female superheroes, if that's entirely the right word.
Madame Mirage #3 (Paul Dini/Kenneth Roccafort; Top Cow)
For once, an issue that lived up to its solicitation copy. The secrets revealed actually were shocking, it did change the direction of the series and everything we thought we knew about Mirage.
Issue 3 contains Mirage's origin story. The device for giving us the story is a bit clunky; Mirage has a villain, Lisa Gonzalez, at her mercy -- the story opens with Mirage having placed a stick of dynamite in Gonzalez' mouth; said dynamite turns out to be a dud. Since Mirage's seems to have personal reasons for targeting her, Gonzalez asks why. Mirage is perfectly well aware that Gonzalez is trying to distract her so she can cut through the rope with her deadly and quite functional reinforced fingernails, so she makes her a bet: if Gonzalez can cut through the ropes before Mirage finishes her tale, Mirage will give her a fair shot at the gun on the floor between them. And then she begins.
Mirage tells the tale of Angela and Harper Temple (I still think of them as the sisters Mirage, somehow) and how and why they came to create Mirage. When Mirage finishes her tale, the entire series to date snaps into focus in a way that it hadn't before. You realize that you haven't necessarily been seeing what you thought you saw. You really understand what's been happening and how it all works, how it fits together. And it turns out that, yes, there is a reason why Mirage looks as she does (and I was substantially, if not completely, right about the why of her costume) and why parts of it seem so relentlessly impractical for what she does. It even covers how you can have an evening gown with a long train that blows in the wind, with a thigh-high split that yet gives our heroine relentless cameltoe! (...well, OK, they don't actually mention the cameltoe part.) An explanation for all of it! And it all works and makes perfect sense!
An interesting side effect of the story snapping into focus in this way: once you understand what's really happening, if you go back and look at the earlier issues, the times when we see the sisters Mirage together, it will strike you that perhaps, just perhaps, the sisters Mirage may be wound just a smidge too tight. That they have splinters in the windmills of their minds. Understandable, but somewhat startling to realize. And I do wonder if this might play out somewhat in later issues, or rather, how we'll see that work now that we know what's going on.
A couple of unusual things also get foregrounded by this issue. What I hadn't realized until the end of this issue is that Mirage is sort of ... a female Punisher, if you will. Less directly brutal -- she's not going to beat someone up as a rule. Far better dressed and presented; an evening gown, boots and gloves beat a t-shirt and jeans any day. Nonetheless, everyone she's gone after winds up dead. Nobody's escaped, and she's inflicted a rather interesting amount of collateral damage to her targets, as well. She's not afraid to get her hands dirty, to kill, and that's an unusual depiction for a female ... well. What to call Mirage? Is it valid to call her a superhero when her goal is not to capture the bad guys, but to kill them, and she succeeds? We wouldn't call a man in the same situation a superhero. She's not precisely an assassin -- she's not doing it for hire. Another unusual thing is that there are no sympathetic major or minor male characters whatsoever to date. That's strikingly odd for any series, especially one in which the main character actually murders the bad guys.
All of that makes me wonder, somewhat, who the natural audience for this title is. No sympathetic male characters means that a lot of the average younger male readers aren't likely to hang around; they do like story with their cheesecake, which you get here, but they also like having some guy to identify with. I could easily recommend it for most of the women comics readers and most of the male comics readers I know ... although it might be a very strange recommendation. "Yes, I know the first two issues are really cheesecakey, but stick with it! The story explains it all in issue 3! ... OK, yes, the art gets INTENSELY cheesecakey in issue 3 but it still works! Trust me!"
A mild snark about this issue's art: apparently, they've had enough time between issue 0 and now for Dini and Roccafort to hear the complaints about Mirage's improbable bosom. They raised the line of her bodice the barest inch, so that she no longer looks like she's going to fall out, and they gave her nipples. Boy, did they give her nipples! In every panel where you can see her chest, you got nipples. Even Gonzalez has nipples inside the magazine, if not on the cover. Nipples, nipples everywhere! Mirage is clearly no longer a member of the nipplefree brigade. And apparently, the room where Mirage is holding Gonzalez is ice cold. (I will go to my grave having vigorously denied that I said it, but if this is the alternative, perhaps there's something to be said for anatomical innacuracy.)
...OK, I will indulge in one mild bit of mild snark about the cover. Yes, this is a scene that occurs within the story itself. Yes, given the position she's in and what she's wearing, it's not necessarily unreasonable for Gonzalez' golden globes to be ... er, quite so globularly present, if you see what I mean. (Though she does seem herself to be a member of the nipple-free brigade, but then, it is the cover.) No, the snark is about Mirage herself. I mean, seriously, people. A glowing M on her butt? Her butt itself is glowing! Eesh. (...Well, I did say it was mild snark.)
Strongly recommended, and whoda thunk I'd say that about Madame Mirage?
Foolkiller #1 (Greg Hurwitz/Lan Medina; Marvel MAX)
This book earns it's "Explicit/Mature Readers" note pretty much from page 1. We start with the Maguffin -- pardon, with Nate McBride, former collection heavy to a mobster, getting beaten to a pulp. On page 3, his hand gets shoved into a garbage disposal. Turns out that Nate's stolen forty large from his employer, who is not amused. Turns out that Nate hid what's left of the money in his ex-wife's house, where his children also live, without the knowledge or consent of said ex-wife. This gets his youngest daughter killed and his wife raped and also murdered. His mangled hand forces Nate to go to the public hospital ER, where the staff is being seriously overworked due to the activities of someone the patients are calling Foolkiller. His quite literal calling card is "The Fool" from a tarot deck, with the words "Are you" scrawled above the card name. Foolkiller has been killing and maiming bad guys with creative abandon (the three goons in the no-evil monkeys pose is especially precious), and Nate searches for him until he finds him.
The artwork on this issue is very very good, absolutely stunning. The muted color palette both matches the story, and manages to keep the gory bits from being too gory. The story ... is not quite as good as the art. For example, there's an early scene interpolated into Nate's beatdown of a poolhall where several men have just gang-raped a woman; we see an arm and leg coming in a window, and a man saying, "Guess you boys didn't learn in lecture hall not to bring a dick to a knife fight." Turns out that those boys are members of the university lacrosse team and ... I'm going to leap out on a limb and say that perhaps, just perhaps, the editor should have changed that from lacrosse to pretty much any other team sport, given the way that real life situation worked out. (Sad thing is, pretty much any team sport would have done.) Anyway, the lacrosse players all wind up castrated and dead, and entirely inappropriately inserted into Nate's story at a place that confuses the narrative; given that we know that the bad guys have gone after his family, your first assumption is that the woman on the pool table is Nate's wife, which isn't the case.
Question: have characters been Fridged if they're never defined or developed, and the person their death is supposed to motivate is himself only a Maguffin? Anyway, I can't recommend the story, which is kind of sad because that artwork really deserves to be seen. But I also won't give it a "not recommended" rating, since I think I'm sincerely the wrong audience for this. I'm guessing if you really like The Boys or Punisher or Hellblazer, you might like this.
Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service vols. 1-4 (Eiji Ohtsuka/Housui Yamazaki)
First, I really don't like horror much. It doesn't scare me, and vast quantities of blood and gore are kind of revolting. (That said, these days, you get about the same amount of blood in a superhero comic; recent issues of Invincible are only an exsanguinated virgin or three away from being Elizabeth Bathory's favoritest stories ever! But I digress.) Nonetheless, I like Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, which manages to be interesting and intriguing and gruesome somehow without being even the slightest bit scary ... though your mileage may vary on that.
The stories follow the adventures of a group of students from a Buddhist college, who wind up banding together through circumstance, a peculiar set of abilities and the inability to find any other paying work. The stories are essentially a procedural without police, or maybe a really gruesome version of the Scooby-Doo mysteries (including a van, even); the kids investigate, determine what they need to know and what they need to do, and then gruesome hijinks ensue. Kuro Karatsu speaks with the dead, and is god-or-ghostridden besides; Numata dowses using his bone pendant/ring, and finds the dead with whom Kuro speaks; Makina is a master embalmer; Yata apparently has formed a link with an alien in outer space who has some knowledge that the humans lack, and can only cope by having the alien speak through a handpuppet he wears all the time; Ao Sasaki is the sensible leader -- well, as sensible as she can be, given this group -- and internet/computer master geek. The stories themselves combine horror with mystery; who is this story's dead person, how did they get that way, and where do they need to go? A lot of the time, rather understandably, the dead only want vengeance, but some of the time, they just want to be somewhere specific.
The first volume contains a series of short stories; the second contains one long story, focusing on Sasaki and her family history; then the volumes shift back to having somewhat connected short stories. The characters are well written and defined, and the stories themselves very interesting. Oddly, none of the characters aside from Sasaki have been given much background; the title was briefly cancelled after volume 2, and the author said that he'd wanted to do that background and show why each of them has the abilities they have, and that the cancellation prevented that. For some reason, he hasn't gone back to that with the renewal of the title; I hope he does, since that was the most interesting (if ickiest) of the volumes so far. There's also a quirk in the character definition as it currently stands: the three young men all have some sort of supernatural ability, while the two young women have both have specialized education and knowledge. The god/ghost that rides Karatsu has been seen to jump to the other men at one point when he needed ... something, but he hasn't been seen to jump to the women. The crossover story with Mail in volume 4 (see review, below) makes it clear that something more is going on with Karatsu and his god/ghost, but we don't know what just yet.
The artwork is very clear and clean, making the gory horrific bits stand out for their more intense shading and detail. The characters, both regular and minor, are easy to distinguish and consistently handled. There are also occasional cityscape or landscape scenes where the attention to detail is absolutely stunning and must have taken ages to draw. That said, the naked dead girls in volumes 1 and 4 -- the series earns its "mature readers" wrapper -- are a bit disquieting, both for the number and the attention to certain details. In a way, it seems odd to object; both Japanese and Western film, for example, have a long tradition of putting naked girls into horror for no apparent reason. On the other hand, the hand-drawn artwork means that you become oddly aware that the artist spent a certain amount of time detailing a corpse's pubic hair and labia. That said, in two scenes, the naked bodies (one is actually alive, for certain definitions of "alive") are meant to disturb precisely because of their nakedness; that very attention to detail means that, for example, in one specific scene in the first volume, and another in the fourth, the story conveys without words exactly what's been happening to these two women's bodies, and the sheer degree of wrongness involved. THAT said, another story makes it clear that naked women are the attraction; a full-frontal nude male corpse is handled with much less attention to detail than the naked women shown in exactly the same situation and position somewhat earlier in the same story.
I wouldn't want all that to put anyone off buying the volumes. I really did like them a lot, and would recommend the stories to adults and maybe to older (much older) teens who like horror and/or detective stories.
Mail vol. 1 (Housui Yamazaki)
Yamazaki's solo title is about Akiba, a man who investigates sightings of hostile ghosts and dispatches them to the afterlife with Kagutsuchi, his holy gun. He also sees dead people as a side effect of a medical procedure explained in the last chapter, his origin story. The stories essentially follow a formula: ghost is sighted, sometimes reported to Akiba or sometimes he finds out through his instincts or sight, spooky strange and sometimes gruesome things happen, and then he shoots them, citing the appropriate incantation to dispatch them. It's fun, and the artwork is actually a little more inventive than in Kurosagi, but it is awfully formulaic. Think "Night Stalker", but without Kolchak's personality quirks (or, sometimes, any character at all -- Akiba is a bit bland now and again). It's partially by design -- the character wants to be underestimated -- but it also means that the setting and situation and supporting characters wind up being much more interesting than the main character. You know that he'll appear and dispatch the ghost -- more or less in time, depending on how exactly "in time" is defined -- so the interest lies in the specific haunting.
For whatever it's worth, in volume 1 there is one and only one naked woman, quite alive, seen from behind on page 1 as part of a nature photography shoot. Mail didn't have, and doesn't really deserve, a mature readers wrapper. It's not even terribly gruesome.
Fun and recommended; just don't expect anything as varied or interesting as Kurosagi.
Mark of Aeacus
Charles "Zan" Christensen/Mark Brill
Class Comics, $9
I had to think about this one for a while before I decided to review it. After all, Class has, to date, published only porn comics and calendars, so this would be porn, right? ... Actually, not so much.
Jack, our protagonist, has been having himself a bad life lately. At one point, he tried to kill himself, but couldn't go through with it. At another, he was brutally beaten in what may or may not have been a gaybashing -- it's entirely unclear from context, since the only thing his assailants call him is "nobody". Jack lets himself get picked up by an older man from out of town, taken back to his hotel. The man seems to understand Jack, seem to understand that he wants to use sex to forget, to "erase" himself for a time.
There follows a prolonged, but surprisingly not particularly salacious, sex scene. Not salacious because things keep happening that have nothing particularly to do with the sex. It's here that we get flashbacks to Jack's suicide attempt and beating. We get flashbacks to what the mark of Aeacus has led the businessman's body to do. We also get flashbacks to what appears to be Aegina and the mythological Aeacus. But mostly, we see the mark of Aeacus itself, apparently a tattoo low on the businessman's back, transfer itself most dramatically from the businessman to Jack. Being as he's rather busy at the time, Jack doesn't notice this himself until the next day, when he wakes alone and discovers that the businessman is gone and he has a tattoo of a half-closed eye, surrounded by decoration, under his navel. And then, of course, the fun begins.
Brill's art is striking, dark and subtle and entirely unlike anything you'd expect to see in a Class Comics title. While the characters are understandably nude during their sex, there's no full on crotch shots, no penetration shots, nothing like that; as I said, it's neither particularly salacious nor gratuitous, graphic but not explicit. Even the one full frontal nude that occurs, during a late fight scene, is purely a matter of framing (and, to be fair, feels vaguely like the publishers might have said, "Can we please have a cock shot? ANY cock shot? ... well, OK, if that's all we get, we'll make do",) and the man shown is only normally endowed, so to speak. Christenson's story, like the art, is also understandably dark; you get a strong sense of Jack's despair and how lost he is, his confusion at how he's been changed the morning after. It leaves you curious to see what happens to Jack after the end of the first issue.
If Class is going to continue with this type of thing -- and I hope there's enough material out there for them to do so -- Class should look into making another imprint, just so people don't automatically assume that certain stories are porn. And if they're going to publish continuing stories, they should look into a slightly different publishing model and a seriously different pricing model. The cover and interior paper quality are notably superior to what you get in most titles on the market today; that said, publishing a continuing story of any complexity as an annual, as they've done with their more explicit and less involved titles, simply won't work, and publishing a title more regularly at that rather astonishing price point will also simply not do. If they want to maintain the price point, Class should look into doing oversized digest issues, like Empowered, with roughly that number of pages. Something that makes you feel like it's worth indulging in that sort of outlay more than once a year.
Recommended, for those with a bit of money to burn and who don't mind stories with strong sexual content.
Proof (Alexander Grecian/Riley Rossmo; Image): think of this as "X-Files Perhapanauts in Black". Which is to say, a little of the X-Files/Men in Black vibe of senior partner knowing and believing in the supernatural, and junior partner just getting her first exposure to these things. And, you know, Sasquatch -- John "Proof" Prufrock by name and agent of the Lodge (a Canadian/US Government joint) by profession; his parner, Ginger Brown, is selected for the Lodge because she sees something unusual and refuses to alter her report to say she didn't, which makes her the perfect partner for a sasquatch. Their first mission: to find and capture el Chupacabra/the Goatsucker. Great artwork, good story (although the cryptoids -- kind of like the popups on the old MTV show -- can get just a bit annoying) and generally a lot of fun. Highly recommended.
Velocity: Pilot Season (Joe Casey/Kevin Maguire; Top Cow): The first of the Top Cow pilot season stories that I've read through and liked. Complete in one, it contains what's clearly a very truncated origin story for Velocity, a speedster like the Flash, as well as another adventure, in which we discover that one of her former creators is trying to control her. She takes exception to both his attempt and his methods in an entirely effective and appropriate way. Casey's story is a lot of fun, and Maguire's art is clean, distinctive and very good, and enhances the story. Highly recommended.
Madame Mirage #3 (Paul Dini/Kenneth Roccafort; Top Cow)
For once, an issue that lived up to its solicitation copy. The secrets revealed actually were shocking, it did change the direction of the series and everything we thought we knew about Mirage.
Issue 3 contains Mirage's origin story. The device for giving us the story is a bit clunky; Mirage has a villain, Lisa Gonzalez, at her mercy -- the story opens with Mirage having placed a stick of dynamite in Gonzalez' mouth; said dynamite turns out to be a dud. Since Mirage's seems to have personal reasons for targeting her, Gonzalez asks why. Mirage is perfectly well aware that Gonzalez is trying to distract her so she can cut through the rope with her deadly and quite functional reinforced fingernails, so she makes her a bet: if Gonzalez can cut through the ropes before Mirage finishes her tale, Mirage will give her a fair shot at the gun on the floor between them. And then she begins.
Mirage tells the tale of Angela and Harper Temple (I still think of them as the sisters Mirage, somehow) and how and why they came to create Mirage. When Mirage finishes her tale, the entire series to date snaps into focus in a way that it hadn't before. You realize that you haven't necessarily been seeing what you thought you saw. You really understand what's been happening and how it all works, how it fits together. And it turns out that, yes, there is a reason why Mirage looks as she does (and I was substantially, if not completely, right about the why of her costume) and why parts of it seem so relentlessly impractical for what she does. It even covers how you can have an evening gown with a long train that blows in the wind, with a thigh-high split that yet gives our heroine relentless cameltoe! (...well, OK, they don't actually mention the cameltoe part.) An explanation for all of it! And it all works and makes perfect sense!
An interesting side effect of the story snapping into focus in this way: once you understand what's really happening, if you go back and look at the earlier issues, the times when we see the sisters Mirage together, it will strike you that perhaps, just perhaps, the sisters Mirage may be wound just a smidge too tight. That they have splinters in the windmills of their minds. Understandable, but somewhat startling to realize. And I do wonder if this might play out somewhat in later issues, or rather, how we'll see that work now that we know what's going on.
A couple of unusual things also get foregrounded by this issue. What I hadn't realized until the end of this issue is that Mirage is sort of ... a female Punisher, if you will. Less directly brutal -- she's not going to beat someone up as a rule. Far better dressed and presented; an evening gown, boots and gloves beat a t-shirt and jeans any day. Nonetheless, everyone she's gone after winds up dead. Nobody's escaped, and she's inflicted a rather interesting amount of collateral damage to her targets, as well. She's not afraid to get her hands dirty, to kill, and that's an unusual depiction for a female ... well. What to call Mirage? Is it valid to call her a superhero when her goal is not to capture the bad guys, but to kill them, and she succeeds? We wouldn't call a man in the same situation a superhero. She's not precisely an assassin -- she's not doing it for hire. Another unusual thing is that there are no sympathetic major or minor male characters whatsoever to date. That's strikingly odd for any series, especially one in which the main character actually murders the bad guys.
All of that makes me wonder, somewhat, who the natural audience for this title is. No sympathetic male characters means that a lot of the average younger male readers aren't likely to hang around; they do like story with their cheesecake, which you get here, but they also like having some guy to identify with. I could easily recommend it for most of the women comics readers and most of the male comics readers I know ... although it might be a very strange recommendation. "Yes, I know the first two issues are really cheesecakey, but stick with it! The story explains it all in issue 3! ... OK, yes, the art gets INTENSELY cheesecakey in issue 3 but it still works! Trust me!"
A mild snark about this issue's art: apparently, they've had enough time between issue 0 and now for Dini and Roccafort to hear the complaints about Mirage's improbable bosom. They raised the line of her bodice the barest inch, so that she no longer looks like she's going to fall out, and they gave her nipples. Boy, did they give her nipples! In every panel where you can see her chest, you got nipples. Even Gonzalez has nipples inside the magazine, if not on the cover. Nipples, nipples everywhere! Mirage is clearly no longer a member of the nipplefree brigade. And apparently, the room where Mirage is holding Gonzalez is ice cold. (I will go to my grave having vigorously denied that I said it, but if this is the alternative, perhaps there's something to be said for anatomical innacuracy.)
...OK, I will indulge in one mild bit of mild snark about the cover. Yes, this is a scene that occurs within the story itself. Yes, given the position she's in and what she's wearing, it's not necessarily unreasonable for Gonzalez' golden globes to be ... er, quite so globularly present, if you see what I mean. (Though she does seem herself to be a member of the nipple-free brigade, but then, it is the cover.) No, the snark is about Mirage herself. I mean, seriously, people. A glowing M on her butt? Her butt itself is glowing! Eesh. (...Well, I did say it was mild snark.)
Strongly recommended, and whoda thunk I'd say that about Madame Mirage?
Foolkiller #1 (Greg Hurwitz/Lan Medina; Marvel MAX)
This book earns it's "Explicit/Mature Readers" note pretty much from page 1. We start with the Maguffin -- pardon, with Nate McBride, former collection heavy to a mobster, getting beaten to a pulp. On page 3, his hand gets shoved into a garbage disposal. Turns out that Nate's stolen forty large from his employer, who is not amused. Turns out that Nate hid what's left of the money in his ex-wife's house, where his children also live, without the knowledge or consent of said ex-wife. This gets his youngest daughter killed and his wife raped and also murdered. His mangled hand forces Nate to go to the public hospital ER, where the staff is being seriously overworked due to the activities of someone the patients are calling Foolkiller. His quite literal calling card is "The Fool" from a tarot deck, with the words "Are you" scrawled above the card name. Foolkiller has been killing and maiming bad guys with creative abandon (the three goons in the no-evil monkeys pose is especially precious), and Nate searches for him until he finds him.
The artwork on this issue is very very good, absolutely stunning. The muted color palette both matches the story, and manages to keep the gory bits from being too gory. The story ... is not quite as good as the art. For example, there's an early scene interpolated into Nate's beatdown of a poolhall where several men have just gang-raped a woman; we see an arm and leg coming in a window, and a man saying, "Guess you boys didn't learn in lecture hall not to bring a dick to a knife fight." Turns out that those boys are members of the university lacrosse team and ... I'm going to leap out on a limb and say that perhaps, just perhaps, the editor should have changed that from lacrosse to pretty much any other team sport, given the way that real life situation worked out. (Sad thing is, pretty much any team sport would have done.) Anyway, the lacrosse players all wind up castrated and dead, and entirely inappropriately inserted into Nate's story at a place that confuses the narrative; given that we know that the bad guys have gone after his family, your first assumption is that the woman on the pool table is Nate's wife, which isn't the case.
Question: have characters been Fridged if they're never defined or developed, and the person their death is supposed to motivate is himself only a Maguffin? Anyway, I can't recommend the story, which is kind of sad because that artwork really deserves to be seen. But I also won't give it a "not recommended" rating, since I think I'm sincerely the wrong audience for this. I'm guessing if you really like The Boys or Punisher or Hellblazer, you might like this.
Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service vols. 1-4 (Eiji Ohtsuka/Housui Yamazaki)
First, I really don't like horror much. It doesn't scare me, and vast quantities of blood and gore are kind of revolting. (That said, these days, you get about the same amount of blood in a superhero comic; recent issues of Invincible are only an exsanguinated virgin or three away from being Elizabeth Bathory's favoritest stories ever! But I digress.) Nonetheless, I like Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, which manages to be interesting and intriguing and gruesome somehow without being even the slightest bit scary ... though your mileage may vary on that.
The stories follow the adventures of a group of students from a Buddhist college, who wind up banding together through circumstance, a peculiar set of abilities and the inability to find any other paying work. The stories are essentially a procedural without police, or maybe a really gruesome version of the Scooby-Doo mysteries (including a van, even); the kids investigate, determine what they need to know and what they need to do, and then gruesome hijinks ensue. Kuro Karatsu speaks with the dead, and is god-or-ghostridden besides; Numata dowses using his bone pendant/ring, and finds the dead with whom Kuro speaks; Makina is a master embalmer; Yata apparently has formed a link with an alien in outer space who has some knowledge that the humans lack, and can only cope by having the alien speak through a handpuppet he wears all the time; Ao Sasaki is the sensible leader -- well, as sensible as she can be, given this group -- and internet/computer master geek. The stories themselves combine horror with mystery; who is this story's dead person, how did they get that way, and where do they need to go? A lot of the time, rather understandably, the dead only want vengeance, but some of the time, they just want to be somewhere specific.
The first volume contains a series of short stories; the second contains one long story, focusing on Sasaki and her family history; then the volumes shift back to having somewhat connected short stories. The characters are well written and defined, and the stories themselves very interesting. Oddly, none of the characters aside from Sasaki have been given much background; the title was briefly cancelled after volume 2, and the author said that he'd wanted to do that background and show why each of them has the abilities they have, and that the cancellation prevented that. For some reason, he hasn't gone back to that with the renewal of the title; I hope he does, since that was the most interesting (if ickiest) of the volumes so far. There's also a quirk in the character definition as it currently stands: the three young men all have some sort of supernatural ability, while the two young women have both have specialized education and knowledge. The god/ghost that rides Karatsu has been seen to jump to the other men at one point when he needed ... something, but he hasn't been seen to jump to the women. The crossover story with Mail in volume 4 (see review, below) makes it clear that something more is going on with Karatsu and his god/ghost, but we don't know what just yet.
The artwork is very clear and clean, making the gory horrific bits stand out for their more intense shading and detail. The characters, both regular and minor, are easy to distinguish and consistently handled. There are also occasional cityscape or landscape scenes where the attention to detail is absolutely stunning and must have taken ages to draw. That said, the naked dead girls in volumes 1 and 4 -- the series earns its "mature readers" wrapper -- are a bit disquieting, both for the number and the attention to certain details. In a way, it seems odd to object; both Japanese and Western film, for example, have a long tradition of putting naked girls into horror for no apparent reason. On the other hand, the hand-drawn artwork means that you become oddly aware that the artist spent a certain amount of time detailing a corpse's pubic hair and labia. That said, in two scenes, the naked bodies (one is actually alive, for certain definitions of "alive") are meant to disturb precisely because of their nakedness; that very attention to detail means that, for example, in one specific scene in the first volume, and another in the fourth, the story conveys without words exactly what's been happening to these two women's bodies, and the sheer degree of wrongness involved. THAT said, another story makes it clear that naked women are the attraction; a full-frontal nude male corpse is handled with much less attention to detail than the naked women shown in exactly the same situation and position somewhat earlier in the same story.
I wouldn't want all that to put anyone off buying the volumes. I really did like them a lot, and would recommend the stories to adults and maybe to older (much older) teens who like horror and/or detective stories.
Mail vol. 1 (Housui Yamazaki)
Yamazaki's solo title is about Akiba, a man who investigates sightings of hostile ghosts and dispatches them to the afterlife with Kagutsuchi, his holy gun. He also sees dead people as a side effect of a medical procedure explained in the last chapter, his origin story. The stories essentially follow a formula: ghost is sighted, sometimes reported to Akiba or sometimes he finds out through his instincts or sight, spooky strange and sometimes gruesome things happen, and then he shoots them, citing the appropriate incantation to dispatch them. It's fun, and the artwork is actually a little more inventive than in Kurosagi, but it is awfully formulaic. Think "Night Stalker", but without Kolchak's personality quirks (or, sometimes, any character at all -- Akiba is a bit bland now and again). It's partially by design -- the character wants to be underestimated -- but it also means that the setting and situation and supporting characters wind up being much more interesting than the main character. You know that he'll appear and dispatch the ghost -- more or less in time, depending on how exactly "in time" is defined -- so the interest lies in the specific haunting.
For whatever it's worth, in volume 1 there is one and only one naked woman, quite alive, seen from behind on page 1 as part of a nature photography shoot. Mail didn't have, and doesn't really deserve, a mature readers wrapper. It's not even terribly gruesome.
Fun and recommended; just don't expect anything as varied or interesting as Kurosagi.
Mark of Aeacus
Charles "Zan" Christensen/Mark Brill
Class Comics, $9
I had to think about this one for a while before I decided to review it. After all, Class has, to date, published only porn comics and calendars, so this would be porn, right? ... Actually, not so much.
Jack, our protagonist, has been having himself a bad life lately. At one point, he tried to kill himself, but couldn't go through with it. At another, he was brutally beaten in what may or may not have been a gaybashing -- it's entirely unclear from context, since the only thing his assailants call him is "nobody". Jack lets himself get picked up by an older man from out of town, taken back to his hotel. The man seems to understand Jack, seem to understand that he wants to use sex to forget, to "erase" himself for a time.
There follows a prolonged, but surprisingly not particularly salacious, sex scene. Not salacious because things keep happening that have nothing particularly to do with the sex. It's here that we get flashbacks to Jack's suicide attempt and beating. We get flashbacks to what the mark of Aeacus has led the businessman's body to do. We also get flashbacks to what appears to be Aegina and the mythological Aeacus. But mostly, we see the mark of Aeacus itself, apparently a tattoo low on the businessman's back, transfer itself most dramatically from the businessman to Jack. Being as he's rather busy at the time, Jack doesn't notice this himself until the next day, when he wakes alone and discovers that the businessman is gone and he has a tattoo of a half-closed eye, surrounded by decoration, under his navel. And then, of course, the fun begins.
Brill's art is striking, dark and subtle and entirely unlike anything you'd expect to see in a Class Comics title. While the characters are understandably nude during their sex, there's no full on crotch shots, no penetration shots, nothing like that; as I said, it's neither particularly salacious nor gratuitous, graphic but not explicit. Even the one full frontal nude that occurs, during a late fight scene, is purely a matter of framing (and, to be fair, feels vaguely like the publishers might have said, "Can we please have a cock shot? ANY cock shot? ... well, OK, if that's all we get, we'll make do",) and the man shown is only normally endowed, so to speak. Christenson's story, like the art, is also understandably dark; you get a strong sense of Jack's despair and how lost he is, his confusion at how he's been changed the morning after. It leaves you curious to see what happens to Jack after the end of the first issue.
If Class is going to continue with this type of thing -- and I hope there's enough material out there for them to do so -- Class should look into making another imprint, just so people don't automatically assume that certain stories are porn. And if they're going to publish continuing stories, they should look into a slightly different publishing model and a seriously different pricing model. The cover and interior paper quality are notably superior to what you get in most titles on the market today; that said, publishing a continuing story of any complexity as an annual, as they've done with their more explicit and less involved titles, simply won't work, and publishing a title more regularly at that rather astonishing price point will also simply not do. If they want to maintain the price point, Class should look into doing oversized digest issues, like Empowered, with roughly that number of pages. Something that makes you feel like it's worth indulging in that sort of outlay more than once a year.
Recommended, for those with a bit of money to burn and who don't mind stories with strong sexual content.
Proof (Alexander Grecian/Riley Rossmo; Image): think of this as "X-Files Perhapanauts in Black". Which is to say, a little of the X-Files/Men in Black vibe of senior partner knowing and believing in the supernatural, and junior partner just getting her first exposure to these things. And, you know, Sasquatch -- John "Proof" Prufrock by name and agent of the Lodge (a Canadian/US Government joint) by profession; his parner, Ginger Brown, is selected for the Lodge because she sees something unusual and refuses to alter her report to say she didn't, which makes her the perfect partner for a sasquatch. Their first mission: to find and capture el Chupacabra/the Goatsucker. Great artwork, good story (although the cryptoids -- kind of like the popups on the old MTV show -- can get just a bit annoying) and generally a lot of fun. Highly recommended.
Velocity: Pilot Season (Joe Casey/Kevin Maguire; Top Cow): The first of the Top Cow pilot season stories that I've read through and liked. Complete in one, it contains what's clearly a very truncated origin story for Velocity, a speedster like the Flash, as well as another adventure, in which we discover that one of her former creators is trying to control her. She takes exception to both his attempt and his methods in an entirely effective and appropriate way. Casey's story is a lot of fun, and Maguire's art is clean, distinctive and very good, and enhances the story. Highly recommended.