Reviews - Review - FA Online

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.

Doc Macabre 1

Doc Macabre is a slight but nonetheless entertaining comic from the team of Steve Niles and Berni Wrightson.

The Best of Dan DeCarlo/The Best of Stan Goldberg

These two oversize hardbacks reprint material from various Archie titles each concentrating on the work of a single artist. The reproduction is excellent and the colouring, based on the original guides, very sympathetic to the glossy paper.

MAD’s Greatest Artists: Sergio Aragones

To my estimation and experience, Sergio Aragones is the finest living cartoonist. He is also the fastest. He delivers art by the pound, and even today at 73 years of age his genius remains as quick and apparently effortless as it was in 1963 when he first appeared in MAD Magazine.

Showcase Presents Doom Patrol 2

The team is more or less an attempt to do what Marvel did with the Fantastic Four (it’s all too easy to parallel the characters), but making it weirder, ending up more like the X-Men (who I believe debuted after the DP): the team are freaks and misfits, and the villains are weirdoes.

Mouse Guard: The Black Axe 1

When summarised, this comic combines all the things that I hate. Cute, anthropomorphosised animals. Oldie-worldie dialogue. A mock-medieval setting. A quest for a (presumably) fabulous object. Why then is it rather good?

The Sandman

We don’t generally think of this as one of Kirby’s more notable works. When the character came back in the ’60s Earth-2 revivals, it was with the earlier gasmask costume, rather than the more conventional superhero outfit on show here. This work was just after S&K created Captain America. But it was a genuine hit…

Grim Ghost 0/Phoenix 0

Atlas Comics? I remember them the first time around. They were third rate imitators of Marvel and DC comics and it was a company that appeared and disappeared within a matter of months. These days they’re a curio, recalled with the odd sort of nostalgia that you reserve for the sort of object that you know wasn’t very good but which evokes pleasurable memories anyway.

Showcase Presents Our Army At War 1

I think this is the earliest material DC have reprinted in a Showcase volume – it starts in 1952. I guess this is partly because that’s where the series started, but the fact that it doesn’t look Golden Age must have helped the decision – the standard style for war comics doesn’t seem to have changed so much, and bar the odd racist exaggeration of the Japanese enemies, a lot of this would hardly look out of place today.

Lucky in Love: A Poor Man’s History

On the back cover of Lucky in Love, there’s a quote from David Mazzucchelli: “We’re all lucky when Stephen DeStefano draws comics.” Ignore the cutesy pun on the title, and there’s a lot of truth to that.