Gideon Falls volume 3

Gideon Falls volume 3
Image Comics
Writer: Jeff Lemire
atist: Andrea Sorrentino
FC, 128 pgs, $16.99 US

(The following comments were originally posted on the ComicReaders Comic Reading Facebook Group on Halloween of 2019. That group has since been turned down.)

I am handing out candy and reading this one.

I was on the fence about this series and was considering giving up because it felt confusing and couldn’t get to the point.

It felt less a mystery and more a self-indulgent mess.

Well, it got really good with this trade and it finally feels like it’s going somewhere and questions are being answered. It’s satisfying.

A good spooky one for Halloween. (Matt Barton)

What kept me going in the early issues was the art gymnastics. I feel like the creative team is taking some big risks here with a story that provides almost zero answers for the first— testing my memory here– 12 issues. Volume 3 is definitely where the groundwork starts to pay off.

I’d also like to mention that Gideon Falls is read by three people in my family– my wife, my oldest son, and me. (Chad Boudreau)

Queen & Country

Queen & Country Definitive Edition
Oni Press
Writer: Greg Rucka
Artist: Steve Rolston, Brian Hurtt, and Leandro Fernandez
BW, $19.99 US

It was a crazy 2019 holiday season at ComicReaders, which is just the way we like it. (Thanks to everyone who shopped local for the holidays, by the way.) As a result, it has been a while since I posted and to be honest I did not read ANY comics in the month of December. (Shock!) My bus and evening reading was solely John le Carre.

I had picked up a heavily worn copy of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy a few years ago after watching the BBC miniseries starring Sir Alec Guinness as George Smiley. The first chapter was great. I found the second chapter a slog and put the book down and moved onto other things. As we put our house back together after a renovation was completed in December I rediscovered the novel and decided to give it another go. The first chapter was great. The second chapter was STILL a slog, but I kept going and quickly got lost in this thoroughly gripping spy novel. A spy novel that is mostly Smiley digging through archives and reading old documents or interrogating people!

After Tinker, I borrowed the second novel, The Honourable Schoolboy, from the RPL. That one had actual boots on the ground spycraft but it made me so angry by the end! Needless to say, I followed up with Smiley’s People, which I’ve just about halfway consumed.

These John le Carre books reminded me of the excellent BBC series The Sandbaggers, which ComicReaders’ Dana recommended to me many moons ago. And thinking of The Sandbaggers got me thinking about Queen & Country, the comic series from many moons ago, which is quite fascinating because in December a young chap came into the store and bought Queen & Country volume 1!

Queen & Country is available in three definitive editions from Oni Press and it is a set I like to keep in stock even though I might only sell one edition every 2 years. Dana and I talked about this the other day over breakfast. If you run a comic shop there are certain titles you keep in stock to demonstrate you know your craft. Most often these are current bestsellers, award-winners, and titles that are important to the industry because of their influence, but just as often there are titles that are important to the individuals in the store. Queen & Country is, for me, one of those titles. It did win awards. And it did feature a cast of artists that continue to do stellar work in the industry. And it did give something that I would argue has yet to be duplicated in modern comics– spy stories that feel real– and that is the reason I like to keep it on the shelf. If someone was to come into the store and say, “Hey, you ever read John le Carre?” or “You ever hear of The Sandbaggers?” “Do you have anything like that?” My reply would be, “Well, yes– yes, I do.” And we’d head over to where Queen & Country resides. And as we walked over there I’d look over my shoulder and ask the person’s opinion on that second chapter of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. (Chad Boudreau)

Moonshine #13

Moonshine #13
Image Comics
Writer: Brian Azarello
Artist: Eduardo Risso
FC, 32 pgs, $3.99 US

Moonshine could have ended at issue #6. All the plot threads were not neatly tied off, but it was a satisfying final issue to the debut story arc. Moonshine eventually returned for another six issues and when #12 hit it once again felt like the creative team could walk away feeling proud and I could walk away feeling like the story had a conclusion. Again, not everything wrapped up in a bow but some of the best stories don’t have tidy endings so I never sweat the small stuff. And now as of last week, Moonshine is back for another arc and I’m confident I’ll settle in nicely, enjoy the ride, and get back out feeling satisfied.

In Prohibition era America, a New York mob boss sends a hood into the Appalachian mountains to cut a deal with a moonshiner whose booze is a hot ticket in the city’s clubs. The mob boss wants control, see, because the moonshine is cutting into his own booze business. The moonshiner and his clan are just as tough and stubborn as the mob and so, of course, the two groups don’t get along.

And there’s werewolves.

That sounds ridiculous and looking at a slew of online opinions suggests readers have either embraced or completely rejected this genre mash-up. Me, I’m all in, of course, because creators Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso are cool hands at creating big personalities, juggling large casts, and playing within the defined rules of genres even as they upturn the applecart. They created 100 Bullets, a title that took a simple question and turned it into an epic featuring at least a dozen central characters, all damaged and multi-faceted, all racing toward a tragic and inevitable conclusion. 100 Bullets is a character driven crime comic that has not yet been equaled in scope. They also created Spaceman, a hard sci-fi in the guise of a crime tale about a kidnapping. So when I read that Azzarello and Risso were doing a new comic about Prohibition, gangsters and werewolves, I did not hesitate for a second.

Moonshine is populated with tropes of the grittiest crime stories. Tough talk, threats through body language, dangerous dames, tommy gun ambushes, double crosses. It also has werewolf staples like moonlit transformations, the reluctant beast, and the troubled beauty. It also has some elements unique to the creative team: Azzarello’s terse, stripped down dialogue; his irredeemable yet engaging characters; Risso’s character designs with tired, sorrowful (or angry) eyes for the men; full, sinful lips and figures for the women; dark palette for colours; and key scenes that are worthy of hanging on a wall.

Moonshine is pulp. Delicious, nasty pulp. (Chad Boudreau)

Firefly at Boom Studios

Firefly
Boom Studios
Writer: Greg Pak
Artist: Various
FC, 32pgs, $3.99 US

I was reluctant to try Firefly when it was relaunched at Boom Studios in November 2018. I had read the Serenity series for years (2005 to 2017) at Dark Horse Comics– first as material between the television series and the movie, then Shepard Book’s back-story, and then the adventures of the crew post-movie.

The later, after-the-movie material was the best of the bunch, with stories written by Zach Whedon initially and then Chris Roberson at the end. The writers’ handling of the crew, particularly Zoe, mourning Wash and floating on was an emotional draw for me. So, too, was the realization that there were more surviving “students” of the Alliance Academy, which was responsible for the extraordinary state of River Tam. This idea was just beginning to be explored in Serenity when it was announced the series would move to Boom and that Boom had no plans to continue the ideas presented in the Dark Horse series.

Ugh.

When Boom revealed the Firefly series would tell stories before the Serenity movie, I decided within my own fan mind that, for me, the Dark Horse series could exist in the same story ‘verse as the Boom series as long as Boom did not do something that would cover material already covered by Dark Horse.

So I bought issue #1 when it came out in November 2018. I did so grudgingly; but, damn, that was a fine debut. I’m ten issues in now and thoroughly enjoying every every page.

If you are a Firefly fan and are unfamiliar with the comics that carry on the adventures of the crew, the Dark Horse material is being republished by Boom in what they call Legacy editions. As for the new material under the Boom banner, the first four issues are collected in the Firefly: Unification War hardcover. Volume 2, which collects issues 5-8, was released in December 2019. (Chad Boudreau)

Hellboy and The BPRD 1952

Hellboy and The BPRD 1952
Dark Horse Comics
Writer: Mike Mignola & John Arcudi
Artist: Alex Maleev
FC, 144 pgs, $19.99 US

In Hellboy and the BPRD 1952, members of the BPRD are sent to a Brazilian village to investigate a series of grisly, unexplained murders. Accompanying them is Hellboy. It’s his first mission.

I’ve been watching Hellboy beat the tar out of monsters for 25 years or more so it was refreshing to see him ask a seasoned agent, “Archie, you’ve been doing this a while. Is this…normal? I mean for what you guys do.” He and Archie– a kind solider that took a shine to young Hellboy when the demon was locked away in a U.S. Air Base– are walking through a cavernous room in the dark bowels of an old prison. The room is full of dead bodies in glass tubes filled with liquid. That kind of personal touch in dialogue is sprinkled throughout this miniseries, like when it is remarked that Bruttenholm did not say good-bye to Hellboy and Bruttenholm curtly replies that Hellboy did not say farewell either. “He hates it here, Margaret,” says Bruttenholm. “We’ve tried to make it a home for him, but he hates it.”

When Hellboy first encounters a dead body in the Brazilian village, he hangs back as the human members of the BPRD team investigate. Hellboy just does not know what to do.

The day before I started this miniseries I had finished BPRD: The Devil You Know volume 3: Ragnarok, the end of the BPRD / Hellboy saga started more than 25 years ago. That volume and everything preceding it makes BPRD / Hellboy one of the greatest achievements in modern comics. As soon as I finished that volume I dug out my Hellboy collections with the intent to start reading the saga all over again. But I remembered I had Hellboy and the BPRD trade paperbacks I had not yet read. 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, and 1956 going back to the early days of Hellboy’s career in the BPRD. New adventures populated with familiar faces from other Mignolaverse stories, including Bruttenholm and Varvara, one of the great “partnerships” in comics. “Because the professor is being my favorite. My favorite human of all.” (Chad Boudreau)