TITLE: The Unsinkable Walker Bean
AUTHOR/ARTIST: Aaron Renier
FORMAT: Softcover
PUBLISHER: First Second Books
PRICE: $13.99
RELEASED August 17

By Lora Van Marel
Staff Writer, One-Woman Show

This is the story of Walker Bean and his nautical adventure. Walker is very close with his grandfather, but when his grandfather gets mysteriously ill after looking at an enchanted skull, it is Walker’s mission to return the skull to its rightful home.

At first glance it seems like Walker is modeled off of a young Indiana Jones and filled with adventure, but as the story progresses Walker’s character seems to simply be a child forced into this sea voyage in order to save his grandfather’s life. This makes his character more relatable to the children that are the target audience of the book. His weaknesses make the story far less entertaining. After about the third page the reader is already bored with all of Walker’s crying, because he never stops crying!

Image from firstsecondbooks.com.

The story is a typical adventure tale filled with battle scenes, evil lobster women, stowaways, mythical creatures, and magical items. It was creative, but nothing really stuck out as being truly unforgettable. No big twist ending or epic surprises, it just stuck to the typical formula. Children will find this comforting and be entranced by the story, but it wasn’t amazing.

The illustrations are very cartoonish, reminiscent of the art from Where’s Waldo? The characters and backgrounds are all very generic and on large full page panels there is so much detail that the reader might even feel tricked into looking for Waldo.

This book was written for children. Reluctant readers will be drawn to this adventure story because it will be far simpler then reading a large novel. Kids will not pick up this book over superhero, Bone, or even Babymouse graphic novels and it will not hold the attention of adults.  It’s basically just a mediocre read.

RATING: 3/10

Front page image from firstsecondbooks.com.

TITLE: Irredeemable, Vol. 3
AUTHOR: Mark Waid
PENCILLERS: Peter Krause, Diego Barreto. Cover by Barry Kitson.
COLLECTS: Irredeemable #9-12
FORMAT: Softcover
PUBLISHER: BOOM! Studios
PRICE: $16.99
RELEASED: July 2010

By Rob Siebert
Editor, Fanboy Wonder

There’s a page in this book that shows The Plutonian, during his hero days. He’s underwater, pulling a sunken ship up to the surface by a massive chain.

The only dialogue on the page is: “Do you know what an average day was for me? Can you even imagine?”

Things like that are what make me love this series. That’s right! I said love! I love, love, LOVE Irredeemable. It’s rich with human emotion, action and conflict in the best possible ways. It’s the most realistic superhero book I’ve ever read. The only real complaint I have about it is that the issues fly by too fast.

The third collected volume in the series kicks off with Charybdis revealing to the rest of the Paradigm that he now has super powers to rival the Plutonian’s, as the US government sinks to a new low to try and stop the all-powerful mad man. Meanwhile, The Plutonian meets with someone he believes to be his dead partner, Samsara. By the end of the book, Bette Noir finally tells all about her relationship with The Plutonian, and we finally find out where the former hero’s arch nemesis Modeus has been hiding.

Image from comicculturewarrior.files.wordpress.com

As I’ve stated before, The Plutonian, whose real name is Tony, is an obvious metaphor for Superman, and that metaphor just gets stronger and stronger with each passing issue. In this book we get a closer look at the isolation Tony has felt over the years. It’s the same isolation we’ve seen Superman feel at times.

But Irredeemable is more than a “What if?” story about Superman. It takes the common hero/villain archetypes and unapologetically tears them apart. There is no black and white in the world these characters live in. Not anymore, at least. It’s entirely gray. Almost every character we’ve met in this book has some kind of major flaw, or psychological weakness. They’re super-powered beings, but they’re so incredibly human. They’re some of the most human characters I’ve ever encountered in a comic book. That’s what makes Irredeemable so fantastic. You can legitimately relate to so many of the characters on a personal level.

Even The Plutonian, as diabolical as he’s become, is relatable. We don’t actually see this happen, but there’s a scene where a member of one of young Tony’s first foster families recalls him trying to hold a baby. But with his enhanced strength, he accidentally squeezes the baby too hard, and…yeah. As readers, we don’t use those memories to justify what Tony has done. But it makes us understand how monsters are born. And how unbelievably cool is that?

The book is unapologetically disturbing at times. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. Irredeemable is in your face, balls out storytelling at its best. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can’t wait for more.

RATING: 10/10

Front page image from danpanosian.com.

TITLE: Machete
STARRING: Danny Trejo, Steven Seagal, Michelle Rodriguez, Jeff Fahey, Cheech Marin, Lindsay Lohan, Don Johnson, Jessica Alba, Robert De Niro
DIRECTOR: Robert Rodriguez & Ethan Maniquis
STUDIO: Troublemaker Studios/Hyde Park Entertainment/Overnight Productions/TriBeCa Productions
RATED: R
RUN TIME: 105 min
RELEASED: September 3

By Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

This has certainly been the summer for over-the-top action. Last month we had The Expendables, and now we have Machete, which in my eyes not only outdoes that movie on many different levels, it does it completely being in on the joke, and that’s half of its charm. Originally conceived as a ‘fake’ movie trailer shown as part of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s ode to trashy 1970’s cinema, Grindhouse, it consisted of two feature-length films each directed by one of the directors, with four movie trailers between them.

Despite the so-bad-it’s-good approach, the project had some real talent directing the trailers, three of them having the likes of Rob Zombie (Halloween, The House of 1000 Corpses), Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, the Hostel films) and Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Shaun of the Dead) directing, all making the double feature a great sloppy love letter to the great grindhouse cinema of yesterday. Fans liked the Rodriguez’s Machete ‘trailer’ enough to actually inspire him to stretch it out into a film of its own, with everyone’s favorite Mexican tough guy, Danny Trejo, starring as the lead.

Photo from reelthinker.com.

The reason Machete works as well as it does it mainly due to the simplicity to its main framework, all fleshed out by an all-too real subplot not dissimilar to the fear and panic pushing proposals to US immigration problems towards the south border. However, it’s the film’s ridiculous nature and irreverent sense of humor that keeps everything grounded enough that it doesn’t get bogged down by preachiness or serious talk.

Machete is a former Mexican Federale who, after having everything that meant anything to him taken away, flees to America to escape his past. Working as a day laborer, he gets hired by Michael Benz (Jeff Fahey) to assassinate Texas State Senator McLaughlin (Robert De Niro), a greasy politician with hardline politics on how to solve the immigration problems and more than his fair share of dirty laundry. De Niro plays the prickly, race-baiting asshole role so well that it’s hard to not feel dirty watching him onscreen.

What Machete doesn’t realize is that the entire plot is a setup to make the voters feel for McLaughlin and re-elect him, so that Benz can continue do his drug trafficking into the country. After the job doesn’t go as planned, Machete ends up coming at the mercy of Agent Sartana (Jessica Alba) and Luz (Michelle Rodriguez), two women at opposite ends of the law but with similar morals, all while on the run from Benz’s men and a scene-chewing Steven Seagal, as druglord Torrez.

While the idea of a revenge plot in an action movie is dime a dozen, director Robert Rodriguez knows his way around a scene, and more than ably sets up the action in a way that keeps up the tension and draws laughs, albeit in a more gruesome sense of the word, but that’s what he does best.

Photo from reelthinker.com.

One of the best things about Machete is the fact that Rodriguez played up the actors’ strengths and not their weaknesses. Both Seagal and Trejo aren’t exactly known for their acting chops, so he doesn’t force it with them. And for the most part, the casting was pretty well done. It’s hard not to laugh seeing Lindsay Lohan playing a hard-partying socialite, hardly a stretch. And Don Johnson’s role as the leader an anti-immigration vigilante group is scarily realistic.

But most people out to see this movie are going to for the action and the violence, and it delivers. Without spoiling any surprises, the things that Machete does with his blades are by far some of the most creative I’ve seen in a long time, particularly a certain scene that takes place in a hospital. And while the film was shot to look cheesy at points, they did a great job with much of the gore, which didn’t look nearly as computer aided as some of the bloodier scenes in the aforementioned Expendables. Limbs fly around, blood splatters everywhere, and the climactic ending is both gloriously ultraviolent and laugh-inducingly stereotypical, and that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

While some people may make a big deal about the politics surrounding the film—to put it bluntly, Machete makes a pretty obvious statement about where it stands on the political scale—but to base a film with so many ties to exploitation cinema on that alone would be very ignorant, as Machete is about the spectacle, first and foremost, not the politics. While yes, there are some ideas behind the message of the film that can be completely interpreted as such, I think it’s the image of Machete flying through the air with a minigun bolted to the handlebars of a chopper that make more of an impression.

Then again, I’ve always loved Rodriguez’s films (not counting his forays into children’s movies), for better or worse, and that’s the measuring stick upon which I compare Machete to.  It’s trashy, ridiculously violent and tacky, but it’s also a ton of fun. And it never forgets that.

RATING: 8/10

Front page photo image from reelthinker.com.

By Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

About a month or so back, I heard about Red, the upcoming Summit Entertainment film hitting theaters October 15. And seeing the trailer, I saw the DC logo, so that piqued my interest. So, like any good comic book reader, I decided to go out and pick up the trade paperback.

After reading Red, the three-issue story by Warren Ellis and pencilled by Cully Hamner, I was confused, very confused. Now I’m well used to Hollywood using and abusing our favorite comic books and malforming them into whatever story they want to sell. We’ve seen it happen with the biggies like Batman, Spider-Man and X-Men, among others. Hell, I could go on forever.

But now, something more nefarious is happening. The well is starting to run dry, so they’re going for the more ‘fringe’ stories, stories that should probably be left alone. Hell, after what they did to Jonah Hex, I shouldn’t ever have faith in Hollywood’s idea of what a comic book movie should be. But then again, the last twenty years also brought us such cinematic classics like Dick Tracy, The Phantom, and Monkeybone, so it’s obviously been a longtime practice for the guys in their think tanks to come to the conclusion that this is what viewers want.

Back to Red, I’m really confused as to how it’s going to be made into a film that has any sense of reverence to the source material when they’re playing it off like an action-comedy, bordering on a buddy-cop type of film. Perhaps I’m being presumptuous, as I’m only going on the trailers I’ve seen for the movie, but I think it’s safe to say that they’re not going to capture the cold blooded nature of the comic in any way, shape or form.

In Warren Ellis’ book, it tells the story of Paul Moses, a retired CIA Agent living out his golden years in seclusion, punctuated only by the occasional letter from his granddaughter, who lives in England, and a weekly phone conversation with his ‘handler’ back at his former headquarters. Michael Beesley, the newly appointed Director of the CIA is shown a number of files as part of his initiation. Learning of what atrocities Moses had committed—we never find out what exactly he did—Beesley decides that the only way to keep these secrets safe is by assassinating Moses. This plan goes belly-up; Moses turns out to be harder to kill than planned, and he goes out for vengeance. The story only has four characters worth mentioning, and is tidily wrapped up in its three issue run.

How Erich and Jon Hoeber managed to stretch this story out into a screenplay for a feature length film is beyond me. Even more confusing is how they apparently must have sat back and thought that the story wasn’t epic enough with one badass to go out for blood, that they needed three more. So basically, somehow the story was mutated to include not only Bruce Willis as Moses, but Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren as members of some sort of elite team that they all used to be part of. Somewhere in there they wrote in a love interest for him, in the form of Mary-Louise Parker, because all badasses need a girl on their arm while they’re capping motherfuckers. Even moreso if they’re part of the Viagra league. That just goes without saying.

Now I’m going to be honest here, the movie looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun, and I’m sure it’ll be enjoyable at the very least. The talent that they have going into the film is at least of a higher caliber than that of, say, The Losers, another comic adaptation that kind of came out of the blue. My problem is the fact that something like this shouldn’t be named Red, or based off of the comic at all. Hell, if they really had to flesh out the story to be some kind of ridiculous action flick, they could have still done it with just Bruce Willis. Considering how many people would go see it just based on his presence, they could have attempted to do it somewhat in the spirit of the film. Just look at how many people love the Die Hard movies.

But if they did that, it wouldn’t be a guaranteed payoff. The comic, while not the most violent out there, is definitely something that would earn a film adaptation a hard R if done in the spirit of the book. And there’s something to be said about Ellis’ version of Moses, who does a lot more shooting than he does talking, but that’s an acceptable risk in my opinion. Red is the type of book that could have been recreated word for word, and unlike Watchmen, which had way too many twists and turns to be easily recreated in the film medium, this would have adapted perfectly. Hell, the book itself could have been used for storyboards.

But, Hollywood had to be the greedy pig that it is, and go for the easy bucks. It’s easier to market an action-comedy with a PG-13 rating than it is an R rated revenge movie, especially if it’s something of this nature. I’m well aware of the difficulty that Summit would have trying to advertise a movie about a man that goes, Lone Ranger style, and takes down an entire building of CIA Agents. Aside from the action movie crowd, that just doesn’t happen unless you’ve got the money behind the project already, or you go full-on and dive into the cheese. As much as I love action movies as a guilty pleasure, I’m well aware of the fact that the only way they get made is for the spectacle, not the substance, unless that substance tastes like Velveeta.

TITLE: Wolverine #1
AUTHOR: Jason Aaron
PENCILLER: Renado Guedes. Cover by Jae Lee, variant covers by Steve McNiven and Marko Djurdjevic.
PUBLISHER: Marvel Comics
PRICE: $3.99
RELEASED: September 1, 2010

By Rob Siebert
Editor, Fanboy Wonder

If there’s one character in comics who’s got some demons, it’s Wolverine. And he’s going to kick off the fourth volume of his ongoing series by facing them. All of them.

Nice lead, huh? See what I did there?

The character Wizard Magazine once called “the best comic book character of all time” (which I’ll debate for all time) starts this issue talking to Wraith, on the steps of the church which the latter presides over. Logan talks about how things appear to be looking up in the world, even for him, though he’s naturally cynical. Wraith asks him what he’s truly afraid of…his faith being broken, or rewarded?

Then all hell breaks loose…perhaps literally. Wraith’s church is attacked by Wolverine…or at least something controlling Wolverine’s body. Logan’s girlfriend Melita is then attacked at her job at the San Francisco Post, only to be saved by, of all people, Mystique. She tells her Wolverine is being hunted by a group that hates him even more than she does. We get a shot of this group, and apparently they’re being led by a very old man. Their other targets appear to include Cyclops, Jubilee and X-23. The issue closes with a shot of Logan in the depths of hell.

The concept of Wolverine in hell is a little cheesy. But I think it can work. Especially if Logan is confronted by some (if not all) of the countless people he’s killed over the years. What’s really interesting to me is the idea Wolverine’s hope and faith being tested. Considering he’s likely one of the most cynical characters in American comics, it’ll be interesting to see how Jason Aaron plays with that idea, especially with Logan in the fiery depths.

Renato Guedes does a commendable job on this issue. His work is so detailed. It suits Wolverine well. And if the story somehow turns to crap, fans can at least enjoy his renderings of Wolverine slashing up demons.

We also get a nice back up story featuring the Silver Samurai (who oddly enough is also on the mysterious groups hit-list), illustrated by Jason Latour. It’s a surprisingly touching story about legacy, and courage in the face of death.

I’m not the most avid Wolverine reader, but I enjoyed this issue. I’m interested to see where they go with it. I’m not salivating over it, but they’ve got my attention.

***

TITLE: Freedom Fighters #1
AUTHORS: Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti.
PENCILLERS: Travis Moore, Trevor Scott. Cover by Dave Johnson, variant cover by Shane Davis.
PUBLISHER: DC Comics
PRICE: $2.99
RELEASED: September 1

I’ve seen the Uncle Sam character appear around the DC Universe before, but this is my first real foray into one of his monthly books. I wasn’t disappointed.

The book kicks off with Black Condor and Firebrand taking on a group of meta-human neo-Nazis at a casino run by Native Americans. Then we get The Human Bomb trying to stop an asteroid from colliding with Earth, only to realize it’s inhabited by a primitive race of…hairy things. At the same time, The Ray and Phantom Lady take on Plasmodia, an otherworldly being that has taken control of a small town in West Virginia. After all this wraps up, the team is summoned to the White House, and the President tasks them with finding pieces to a weapon of mass destruction the Confederate army apparently developed during the Civil War. They go looking for the first piece, and are attacked by a strange group of creatures, which leads us into our cliffhanger.

I found myself really enjoying the “American spirit” aspect of this title. The ties to the Civil War, World War II, American bigotry mixed with American pride. It’s got a nice feel to it. And I’m naturally curious to see what kind of WMD could have been developed by the Confederate army. My guess is it’ll be something mystical or magical in nature.

Travis Moore commands the pencils well, especially during the opening brawl with the neo-Nazis. It’s been awhile since I enjoyed a comic book fight like I enjoyed that one.

Money is understandably slim these days, but Freedom Fighters is definitely worth consideration. If you didn’t pick the issue up, flip through it the next time your in a comic shop. You might be surprised.