Weekly Wanderlust – April 5, 2013

Weekly Wanderlust typically features reviews of comics released in the current week, but this one is a selection of comics from recent past weeks.

Comeback #5 (of 5)
Image Comics
Ed Brisson
(a) Michael Walsh

Ed Brisson’s time-travelling miniseries comes to a close. The best thing I can say about Comeback is that it is not a mind-f… that collapses under the weight of its own ambitions.

Brisson’s time-travel plot is tight. Few characters. A narrow window of time. Simplistic, really, if you boil it down to the essentials, which are this: Time travel is illegal. A Federal agent is trying to shut down an organization using it to profit from people that would pay a lot of money to reclaim the lives of recently departed loved ones. And, wisely, Brisson presents us with a few simple, logical rules of how time travel works in his world.

Weekly Wanderlust – Shipped January 16, 2013

Billy the Kid’s Old Timey Oddities and the Orm of Loch Ness
Dark Horse Comics
Eric Powell w/ Tracy Marsh
(a) Kyle Hotz
FC 32 pgs $3.50

The creator of The Goon, one of my favorite ongoing series, and artist Kyle Hotz decided to team Billy the Kid of western legend with sideshow freaks and set them on a series of self-contained adventures in which they fight and protect other grotesqueries. Each features a title that is a mouthful, beginning always with Billy the Kid’s Old Timey Oddities.

The Orm of Loch Ness comes to an end and it does so in a way that holds true to the tone of this particular adventure. There is always violence and dread in these comics, but those are usually tempered by Billy’s tom-foolery. That comedy, I found, has all but disappeared. The result is a tense read with ghastly shocks throughout.

I’m not complaining. (Chad Boudreau)

Weekly Wanderlust – Shipped January 9, 2013

I celebrated my first year as a comic shop owner and the anniversary has gotten me nostalgic. I think back to when I was just a customer at ComicReaders on Grant Road and that leads me to fond memories of writing for ComicReaders.com. I interviewed comic creators and wrote reviews, blurbs of which would sometimes eventually adorn back or even front covers. I still have a print out of the email Roman Dirge sent me after he found my review of Lenore online, and, to this day, if you look at a collection of Elephantmen you will find a snippet of a review I wrote.

In honour of those good times, I shake the dust off Weekly Wanderlust—a weekly column in which ComicReaders.com regulars like Hnetka, Tillusz, Boudreau, Cameron, Hintze, Brennan, and others told comic readers what they thought about the current week’s releases.

Flash Point: Fire Rescue

I had a long-time customer tell me the other day that Flash Point: Fire Rescue has become his go-to game for co-operative play. This was a big announcement because for years his favorite co-operative game was Pandemic, a game many of you readers will know as an excellent co-operative game.

But, you know, I think he might be right…

In Flash Point: Fire Rescue, players are members of a firefighting brigade. The game board is a map of a home— like a detailed blueprint. Around the outer edge of the board outside the home are numbered squares representing the street, sidewalk and lawn. At the beginning of the game, firefighters arrive on the scene of a fire. Inside the home—the exact location unknown—are a number of occupants. Players win by rescuing a predetermined number of occupants. Players lose if four occupants are consumed by the flames or if the building becomes structurally unsound and collapses.

Murder Book / Back to Brooklyn

I developed an interest in crime comics leading up to the creation and release of Acts of Violence: An Anthology of Crime Comics in which my comic “The Three Princes” appears. I researched the genre– from its heyday in the 40s and early 50s, to its decline (and the parallel decline of horror comics) in the late 50s, and eventual resurgence in the late 80s and early 90s– and located and read many of the genre’s shining examples, both past and present, including “Murder, Morphine and Me”, Miss: Better Living Through Crime, and Criminal. My interest in the genre continues post-Acts of Violence and I want to tell you about two additional shining examples of the genre—one a self-published endeavor from an emerging Canadian talent, and the other a book I did not know about until one of its creators told me to check it out.