Date: 08/21/2006

Category: · Writing  » Reviews  » Comic Books · Writing  » Topic  » misc

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Oh we've got some tough cookies this week, yes sir. Fresh from the macho shelves at Isotope and onto your manly plate come The Boys, about a group of vigilantes taking revenge against reckless superheros; The Savage Brothers, about a team of zombie bounty hunters; and Casanova, which is difficult to interpret but appears to relate to some kind of slick superspying. Let's kick it off with The Savage Brothers because that's the coolest. And hey, have you been listening to our comic booky podcast? It's SUPER.

It's the end of days, lakes are on fire, it's raining frogs, and zombies roam. Dirty toughguys Otis and Dale Savage make a living as bounty hunters -- folks pay them to track down the specific zombies that were their family members, and assure that their undead loved ones are put to a specific end. It's a good enough living, and they take their apocalyptic setting with teeth-gritted good humor. And then a mystery man in a suit comissions them to retrieve a zombie doctor from the dangerous zombie slum of Atlanta, and they proceed to get chased, shot at, and then stumble across a head in a jar who's about to sacrifice a virgin stripper. In other words, things get interesting.

A-plus art on this title, thanks to Rafael Albuquerque and Cris Peter; all those intense, glowing neons look just like the end of the world oughta look. Even better are the scratchy, jagged shadows -- they look like they were drawn by actual zombies. The whole book looks like a frantic panic, and that's just how we like our tales of Earth-ending undead. The dialogue by Andrew Cosby and Johanna Stokes, on the other hand, suffers a bit from the Alpha-Male Blands: "Step on it, Otis! I want to get home in time to get drunk." Ho hum, another flawed toughguy antihero. Nothing too new there. But the storyline's electric and the pictures are pretty, and that's good enough for us.

It's all well and good that superheros charge around saving the world, but what happens when they're not very good at it? Now and then there's bound to be a few screw-ups, innocent bystanders hurt, that sort of thing. The Boys, by Garth Ennis (of Preacher fame) and local artist Darick Robertson, follows crime-fighting from the perspective of the victims -- people who've been hurt by careless superheroics and who make it their business to see that the superheros pay.

Issue One starts things off with a slowish introduction: here's the head of The Boys, here's the lady from the CIA who he works with, here's the superhero-haters he works with, and here's some jerky superheros that deserve some what-for. A few pages of action and a lot of pages of tough-guy banter left us struggling to pay attention; we're just on the cusp of bored. But it's a neat enough concept, and the cover looks cool. And that's got to count for something, right?

Reading Casanova, by Matt Fraction and Gabriel Bá, feels like a homework assignment. What's happening here? From one panel to the next, we're leaping all over the place, and everyone's talking about stuff we've never heard about like we're supposed to be able to follow along. The book sort of feels like it's had all its exposition stripped out. Having too much exposition sucks, but having none at all is just disorienting.

As far as we can figure out, Casanova is a suave, heroic superspy, working for and/or against various acronyms. He's dispatched to infiltrate a robotic brothel; he's tortured by his sister; he double-crosses some double-crossers as they dig up some spy gear from a graveyard. He's accompanied on his journeys by scrawly, jagged art that seems to borrow from the 50s Shag aesthetic and that of 60s spy films.

So, that's all kind of neat. But OMG these books are confusing. They're full of knowing references ... to what? Stuff we've never seen? Unexplained connections and relationships? Argh! We're lost. Maybe, if you're a terribly clever gumshoe, you can unravel the mystery of WTF everyone's talking about. Given how text-heavy and dialogue-burdened the books are, though, it might take you a couple days.