Peter Campbell - Review

Echoes 1

Initial expectations: this comic is going to be pretty awful. The pitch – son discovers his father was a serial killer – didn’t promise a great deal, and the serial killer angle is so overused now that the mere mention of it induces stupor. How surprising then to discover that this is intelligently written and drawn, and is certainly one of the best comics found amongst those I’ve randomly sampled of late.

Felix’s Friends

This is an oddity. It’s a twenty-five year old work that’s seen print before in Cruse’s earlier book, Dancin’ Nekkid With the Angels. Here’s it’s reformatted, as originally intended, as though it were a children’s book, and is only available from lulu.com, a print-on-demand publisher.

Amazing Spider-Man 651

It must be a good 20 years since I last read a Spider-Man comic. So what has happened in the intervening years? It turns out Spider-Man has turned into Batman, more or less.

Starman/Congorilla 1

If you have a comic starring a blue alien superhero who also happens to be a bit of a slut, a giant, talking gorilla and Rex the Wonder Dog, then you expect it to be entertaining and a bit surreal. You expect in fact, something like a Grant Morrison comic. This isn’t quite what you get.

3 zombie comics

Raise the Dead v2 2, I, Zombie 9, The Walking Dead 80.

X-23 4

I know nothing about X-23, beyond the fact that her name suggests yet another one of the interminable X-Men spin-offs. A quick Google of her name reveals she’s a Wolverine clone. How unoriginal, and how unpromising.

‘Best’sellers

It’s been said that you can tell the state of the nation from the books that it reads. Even if you disagree with that statement, you can certainly gauge something about people’s attitudes to the media they consume by looking at what’s currently popular. With this in mind, what information can be gleaned from Amazon’s graphic novel bestseller list as of Christmas 2010?

Legion of Super-Heroes 8

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Legion of Super-Heroes. It was a series that was always aware of its own absurdity, with its multitudinous cast of members, all of whom had ridiculous names and often even more ridiculous powers.

Superman/Shazam! – The Return of Black Adam

Both Marvel and DC have been releasing straight-to-DVD animations of their characters for a few years now, with apparently variable results. This is the latest, a collection of shorts featuring a new Superman/Captain Marvel team up, along with previously released features starring The Spectre, Jonah Hex and Green Arrow.

Grimm Fairy Tales Holiday Edition 2010

This comic sounded as though it would be a fun, undemanding read. It’s a portmanteau horror anthology with a Christmas theme, a bit like those Amicus horror movie anthologies from the 1970s. In actuality, it’s poorly written and drawn and I’d to struggle to even finish reading it, only doing so for the purposes of this review.