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)