MAY 2025 - I DON'T WATCH TV ANYMORE

At least not like I used to. I grew up watching TV. As a child, I was enamored with my Saturday morning and weekday afternoon cartoons, as you might expect. Everything from HE-MAN AND THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, THUNDERCATS, and TRANSFORMERS to SUPER FRIENDS to THE SMURFS and GARFIELD AND FRIENDS. I also followed the adventures of THE DUKES OF HAZZARD and THE A-TEAM in live action. I watched TV all the time through elementary school, high school, and college. I took in the TV shows my parents grew up with via "Nick at Nite" and weekday syndication (I have very specific memories of watching THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW anytime I was home sick during elementary school). There were the TGIF sitcoms on ABC (PERFECT STRANGERS was always my favorite). Must-See TV on NBC. STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and DEEP SPACE NINE during the nineties "Golden Age" of first-run syndication. In terms of animation, you had BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, X-MEN, and SPIDER-MAN on Fox Kids when I was in middle school and high school. Then DRAGON BALL Z and GUNDAM WING, among many others, on Toonami during college and beyond.

Then the early twenty-first century brought me THE OFFICE, PARKS AND RECREATION, 30 ROCK, MODERN FAMILY, and more in the comedy genre, as well as 24, PRISON BREAK, LOST, and a slew of other network dramas with a similar serialized feel. In a way, these were -- to me, at least, someone who didn't watch the pay cable channels like HBO and Showtime -- the precursors to "prestige" or "peak" television. Which I'm not sure why we call it that; it was never all good -- but by the later part of the 2000s, I was watching it. I was engrossed with MAD MEN, BREAKING BAD, and THE WALKING DEAD on AMC, and JUSTIFIED on FX, as well as -- having finally gotten an HBO subscription -- BOARDWALK EMPIRE and GAME OF THRONES.

I watched a lot of TV around that time, in the aughts and into the teens. And I liked most all of it. MAD MEN is one of my all-time favorite television experiences ever. I love that show; at the risk of a little hyperbole, I'd even say that I cherish it (or at least I do the first three seasons; I find that my interest plummets the further the narrative moves into the sixties). Likewise, JUSTIFIED, which I adored. GAME OF THRONES was great for the first several years. BREAKING BAD was amazing, but not something I'm particulary attached to; I can't really ever see myself watching it again. And I will never understand how THE WALKING DEAD became the cultural juggernaut that it remains to this day. I gave up on that one a few seasons in; it was too dark and depressing for me. The final scene I ever watched was when a certain baseball bat connected with a certain beloved character's face, and I never looked back (though I did often question why I had even stuck with it for that long, in hindsight).

THE UNBOXING - JULY 2020

After a couple months off, The Unboxing returns with two books and a few digital items. First, from Marvel, it's the SENSATIONAL SHE-HULK BY JOHN BYRNE OMNIBUS. I own this run in four formats now -- original comic books, two trade paperbacks, digital versions of those trades, and now this Omnibus. I can't help it; I love Byrne's She-Hulk! Heck, if IDW was ever to offer an Artist's Edition of pages from this run, I'd buy that, too!

Which turns out to be a nice segue to our next book, from IDW: DAVE COCKRUM'S X-MEN ARTIFACT EDITION. Prior to buying this, I owned exactly one Artist/Artifact Edition, which hit The Unboxing just about two years ago, and that was the JOHN BYRNE'S X-MEN ARTIFACT EDITION... so you can see where my tastes lie. Further, since I don't buy these things very often, I went ahead and splurged on the signed and numbered limited edition, which has a "virgin" wraparound cover, as well as a Chris Claremont autograph. I did the same thing with the Byrne book a couple years ago -- it was a Comic-Con exclusive, signed and numbered by Byrne.

STAR TREK VS. TRANSFORMERS #1 - 5

"PRIME'S DIRECTIVE"
Written by: John Barber & Mike Johnson
Art By: Philip Murphy (#1, 2, 4, 5) & Jack Lawrence (#3)
Colors by: Priscila Tramontano, Leonardo Ito, & Josh Burcham
Letters by: Christa Miesner | Edits by: Chase W. Marotz & David Mariotte

I'm not typically interested in these sorts of crossovers in general. STAR TREK characters encountering characters like the Transformers (or, way back in the nineties, the X-Men) just feels kind of silly to me. They're so, so different that such a crossover could never be "real" in my mind, no matter how much effort the creators might put into it.

So under normal circumstances, I woudln't have glanced twice at this series, even though STAR TREK and TRANSFORMERS are both near and dear to me. I certainly wouldn't have bought it... except I did, for one reason and one reason alone: the stunningly gorgeous Sunbow-style TRANSFORMERS artwork. (Technically it's both Sunbow-style and Filmation style, though since the STAR TREK characters are drawn in the style of the TREK animated series Filmation produced in the seventies).

But we'll get to the art shortly. First, a quick plot rundown and my thoughts on the story: In the twenty-third century (stardate 5892.7, to be exact), the starship Enterprise arrives at planet Cygnus VII to investigate a distress signal from a Federation dilithium mine. Upon beaming down, Captain Kirk and crew find the mine under attack by Decepticons. Optimus Prime bursts forth from the mine, injured, and Kirk orders an orbital bombardment of photon torpedoes to scare the Decepticons off. While Kirk's crew works to resuscitate Prime, The Decepticons flee to a nearby moon, where they find Trypticon has shot down some Klingons. The Decepticons and Klingons form an alliance, while the Enterprise crew encounters more Autobots in the mine.

SPRINGTIME GRAB BAG

It's time once more for that annual tradition where I dig through the various and sundry comics I've bought but have yet to read, and review some of them. This year, I've got offerings in the queue from DC, Dark Horse (sort of), and Dynamite.

We'll start on Monday with the first DC offering, a crossover I would've gone nuts for as a child: HE-MAN/THUNDERCATS. I bought this one a few years ago via Comixology, I think around the same time I also picked up BATMAN/TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES ADVNTURES, but I just never got around to it until now.

We'll follow that up with another crossover, also half from DC: WONDER WOMAN/CONAN. The Conan half of the story comes from Dark Horse, back when they still had the license. And then we'll keep the Conan theme running with a book I grabbed in a Comixology sale when Dark Horse lost that license: CONAN: THE DAUGHTERS OF MIDORA & OTHER STORIES. But our Hyborian Age antics won't end there! The following week, we'll read our first of two books from Dynamite: RED SONJA: THE BALLAD OF THE RED GODDESS, written by Sonja's co-creator, Roy Thomas.

After that, it's one final Dynamite offering: FLASH GORDON: KING'S CROSS, a limited series which sort of revisited the concept of the 1980s DEFENDERS OF THE EARTH cartoon series, in that it teams up King Features' best-known comic strip action stars -- Flash, the Phantom, and Mandrake the Magician. And then we'll hop over to IDW for a look at last year's STAR TREK/TRANSFORMERS series.

All of this will take us through April, and when it's done I'll reveal what's coming up next: something from the House of Ideas, a place we haven't visited in over a year, if you can believe it!

THE UNBOXING - JULY 2019

If you're reading this post, you've somehow traveled back in time. I was insanely busy in July and missed doing the month's Unboxing, so, even though today is actually August 5th, I'm backdating this baby to the final Friday in July.

Two books this month, one from Marvel and one from IDW -- though both star Marvel characters. First, from the House of Ideas proper, we have X-MEN: EVE OF DESTRUCTION, a hardcover collecting the very end of nineties X-Men. And yes, these issues were published in 2001, but to me, they mark the end of the era that started with X-MEN #1 in 1991, as this was the point just before Grant Morrison's run on X-MEN.

I actually don't have the greatest memories of these issues... Chris Claremont's abysmal "Revolution" run on X-MEN and UNCANNY X-MEN had sort of dampened my enthusiasm for the mutant titles, and even though Scott Lobdell returned here to put a bow on the nineties, it just didn't feel the same. So, while -- as I said above -- I consider this the official "end" of that era in X-Men comics, it's not necessarily an end I love. I wanted this book for completist reasons, but I actually prefer "The Twelve" as sort of a real conclusion to the X-Men of the nineties (even if that means the nineties X-Men ended with my favorite mutant, Cyclops, merged with Apocalypse).

And then we have SPIDER-MAN: THE ULTIMATE NEWSPAPER COMICS COLLECTION vol. 5, from IDW's Library of American Comics imprint. I think I read someplace that these books haven't been selling as well since the first two volumes (which were drawn by John Romita), but I'm still on board for picking them up, at least to the point where Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson get married -- which I believe should be in volume 6 or 7, if the series makes it that long.

That's it for July, and right now I don't know that I'm expecting anything in August, so we may not meet for another Unboxing until the fall.

THE UNBOXING - JULY 2018

I'm getting this one in just under the wire for the month, but there's a reason: I picked something up at Comic-Con that I wanted to include for our July Unboxing. First, however, a quick Digital Unboxing: You'll recall that just last month, I grabbed digital versions of a bunch of Dark Horse's USAGI YOJIMBO SAGA books, with plans to get the remaining, earlier Usagi stuff from Fantagraphics whenever they had a sale. Well, that time came sooner than expected, with a linewide Comixology/Amazon sale of the publisher's wares just this month. As such, I picked up USAGI YOJIMBO BOOK 1: THE RONIN, USAGI YOJIMBO BOOK 2: SAMURAI, USAGI YOJIMBO BOOK 3: THE WANDERER'S ROAD, USAGI YOJIMBO BOOK 4: THE DRAGON BELLOW CONSPIRACY, USAGI YOJIMBO BOOK 5: LONE GOAT AND KID, USAGI YOJIMBO BOOK 6: CIRCLES, and USAGI YOJIMBO BOOK 7: GEN' STORY, making me (as far as I know) the proud owner of all collected Usagi stories to date.

I also took advantage of a Viz sale to grab DRAGON BALL SUPER vol. 1, vol. 2, and vol. 3, adapting the ongoing TV series into a manga format (which is totally the opposite of the original DRAGON BALL/DRAGON BALL Z, which was a manga adapted to television.

And now the biggy: from IDW (in cooperation with Marvel), the John Byrne's X-Men Artifact Edition. There have been a few of IDW's "Artist Edition" books which have intrigued me; specifically the John Romita Spider-Man books and the Walter Simonson Thor book, but I've always balked a bit at the price and considered them non-essential items. This, however, is the first in the series which really piqued my interest, and which I considered a must-have.

So since I had wanted the book anyway, when I saw IDW offering an SDCC exclusive version with an alternate cover, signed and hand-numbered by Byrne himself, I jumped to pre-order, and picked it up the first day of the show. I've only skimmed it so far, but it's really nice -- and it's huge! This is the first Artist Edition book I've seen in person, and even though I know how big comic book art pages are, it's still larger than I expected. I can't wait to really sit down and peruse this thing.

But for now, that's it. Will there be an Unboxing in August? Last year that started a three-month stretch of nothing. This time, I guess we'll find out together.

BATMAN/TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES ADVENTURES

"THE FACE OF TWO WORLDS" | "THE CLOWN AND THE CLAN"
"GREENER ON THE OTHER SIDE" | "TO LAUGH SO NOT TO CRY"
"THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS" | "THE TERROR OF THE KRAANG"
Written by Matthew K. Manning | Art by Jon Sommariva
Inks by Sean Parsons | Additional Inks by Serge LaPointe | Colors by Leonardo Ito
Additional Colors by Matt Herms, Jon Rauch, Zac Atkinson, and Sean Galloway
Letters by Shawn Lee | Edits by Bobby Curnow

The crossover you never imagined would exist, yet for some reason does! It's a Batman/Ninja Turtles story, but one that's set very specifically in the worlds of BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES and Nickelodeon's TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES cartoon which ran from 2012 - 2017.

I've never watched that iteration of the Turtles; to tell the truth, I've never watched any TMNT cartoons since somewhere around year six or so of the original eighties run -- so I can't speak to the authenticity of that side of the crossover, other than to say that the Turtles are basically in-line, personality-wise, with their most common interpretations (Leonardo as the cool-headed leader, Raphael the hothead, Michelangelo the goofy jokester, and Donatello the brainiac). I can, however, note that the Batman side of the equation is a nicely faithful recreation of the heydey of THE ANIMATED SERIES. Jon Sommariva, while drawing in his own style (sort of "elastically cartoony", if that makes sense), mimics the character designs and backgrounds originally defined by Bruce Timm and his production team with terrific results. This isn't Timm's style, but it's still clearly his Batman, his Robin, his Arkham Asylum, etc.

The story finds dimensional portals popping up in both Gotham City and the Turtles' New York, allowing several of Batman's villains to escape Arkham Asylum to Turtle-Earth. Batman, Robin, and Batgirl pursue and team up with the Turtles, and while some villains -- such as Clayface and Poison Ivy -- prove relatively easy to dispatch, others -- like the Joker and the Scarecrow -- pose more of a challenge.

SPRINGTIME GRAB BAG

It's that time of year again, where I look at a few random items from the "to read" pile in what has become known (at least to me) as the Springtime Grab Bag!

All of the upcoming reviews will be digital books purchased in various Comixology sales. First, we'll look a couple pulp-influenced offerings from Dark Horse: THE BLACK BEETLE IN: KARA BOCEK by Francisco Francavilla, and CONAN AND THE JEWELS OF GWAHLUR by P. Craig Russell.

After that, we'll jump over to Image for a mini-series I've wanted to check out for quite some time, but just never got around to, MADAME MIRAGE by Paul Dini and Kenneth Rocafort. And then we'll wrap things up with a visit to IDW for a look at their BATMAN/TMNT ADVENTURES mini-series, a crossover between the definitive animated incarnation of Batman and one of the many animated incarnations of the Turtles.

With the Black Beetle, Conan, and Batman and the Turtles, I have some idea of what to expect, but I really don't know what Madame Mirage has to offer, so this should be an interesting few weeks. I hope you'll stick around to see how it all unfolds!

THE UNBOXING - JANUARY 2018

As promised (and previewed) late last year, The Unboxing has been revamped a bit for 2018. It'll mostly be the same -- coverage of items I pre-ordered months earlier as they're released -- but with the added bonus of digital purchases as well as items which were acquired through means other than pre-order.

So let's start 2018 with a couple of Christmas gifts! From my dear wife and published by Fantagraphics as part of their Complete Carl Barks Disney Library, we have DONALD DUCK: THE SECRET OF HONDORICA and UNCLE SCROOGE: THE LOST CROWN OF GENGHIS KHAN. Fantagraphics began publishing the Barks library back in 2011 at a pace of two books per year, with the intention of reprinting every Duck story Barks produced across his two-plus decades writing and drawing Disney comics. There are seventeen volumes out now (out of a projected thirty or so), covering what is widely considered Barks' best period -- the late 1940s through the late 1950s. As a child, I read many of these stories via the Gladstone Comics reprints of the eighties, and I love the idea that I'll eventually have all of them on the bookcase. My intention is to start reading them to my son as bedtime stories in another year or two.

From my dad, I received two collections of 1960s-vintage James Bond newspaper strips from Titan Books: SPECTRE: THE CLASSIC COMIC STRIP COLLECTION and OCTOPUSSY: THE CLASSIC COMIC STRIP COLLECTION. These are companion volumes to the previously released DR. NO: THE CLASSIC COMIC STRIP COLLECTION and GOLDFINGER: THE CLASSIC COMIC STRIP COLLECTION, and between the four books, newspaper adaptations of every one of Ian Fleming's original Bond novels are collected. (And if you think this might be a clue as to an upcoming newspaper strip review project, you could be on to something!)

In the digital realm, I took advantage of some Comixology/Amazon year-end sales to grab a handful of titles at bargain prices, including: THE BLACK BEETLE IN: KARA BÖCEK from Dark Horse, Walter Simonson's classic creator-owned STAR SLAMMERS from IDW, X-MEN EPIC COLLECTION: MUTANT GENESIS and John Byrne's X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS vol. 1 and vol. 2 from Marvel, and BATMAN: YEAR ONE and BATMAN AND ROBIN ADVENTURES vol. 2 from DC.

Thus ends the Christmas haul. Next month is back to a slower pace with, I think, one or possibly two books, so check it out around a month from now!

HALF PAST DANGER

"BITE THE BULLET" | "IN LIKE FLYNN"
"SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES" | "CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER!"
"OURS IS BUT TO DO AND DIE" | "KILLING WITH KINDNESS"
Created, Written, and Drawn by Stephen Mooney
Colors by: Stephen Mooney (#1) & Jordie Bellaire (#2 - 6)
Edits by Chris Ryall & Chris Schraff

HALF PAST DANGER opens in 1943 as a group of U.S. Army soldiers patrols a tropical island which they quickly find to be occupied by A) Nazis and B) dinosaurs. The entire unit is wiped out save for its commander, Sergeant Tommy "Irish" Flynn, who manages an escape. The story picks up some time later as Flynn is recruited by British agent Elizabeth Huntington-Moss to join her team in returning to the island to investigate further. The group is rounded out by Captain John Noble of the U.S. Army and Ishikawa Minamoto, a Japanese defector who happens to also be a ninja.

Our heroes reach the island, meet a German scientist named Greta, and come into conflict with the Nazis, who are loading the dinosaurs into a train, and ultimately onto a boat, in order to return them to Germany. But when the group heads aboard the Nazi ship, we learn that one of our heroes is a traitor, and that the dinosaurs are merely a red herring for the Nazis' true goal -- the capture of Captain Noble.

Ultimately the Nazis are defeated and our heroes rescued by the United States, and we're promised that "Half Past Danger Will Return".

Well, I doubt I'll be along for that ride. As noted a couple weeks, back, this was really just an impulse buy for me when I checked out an IDW sale on Comixology. The collected edition's cover promised "dames, dinosaurs, and danger" and while all three are prevalent in the story, there just wasn't enough of any of it to keep my attention. I like the concept in theory -- a dinosaur-infested island discovered by Nazis during World War II is a fantastic idea, and fits with Hitler's interest in the unusual -- and Stephen Mooney's story is fine. HALF PAST DANGER reads, as I'm sure he intended, like a summer popcorn movie with bold action, diabolical villains, and a decent character arc for the protagonist, Flynn.

PARKER: THE SCORE & PARKER: SLAYGROUND

Last week I spent most of my time talking a bit about the Parker character, but I paid little mind to Darwyn Cooke's artwork. This time I plan to correct that. But first, we'll have a quick rundown of the plots of both THE SCORE and SLAYGROUND.

THE SCORE is a tale of Parker and a dozen associates taking on a job to rob an entire small mining town in the middle of the night. And, much as I stated previously that I liked the prior Parker stories for their showcasing our anti-hero doing everything right and accomplishing his goals without a hitch, I also really like the fact that THE SCORE throws a major wrench into the operation in a twist I don't really want to reveal here, sending Parker and company into a panicked retreat before their operation can be successfully completed. Where the previous stories showed us a cool, capable Parker executing his plans flawlessly, this one gives us a Parker who must improvise in order to save his skin.

Both approaches suit the character very well, and it should be noted that even when everything is going wrong, the plan crumbing around him, Parker takes it all in stride and remains as calm as ever. I guess I should amend what I said last week (and elaborated upon this past Sunday): I like seeing ultra-competent characters do everything right, but I also like when said ultra-competents are forced to wing it and do so in as unruffled a fashion as possible. I think really, what I don't like are panicky characters who dig themselves into deeper holes when they find themselves in a tight spot. To quote one John "Hannibal" Smith, I suppose you might just say that I love it when a plan comes together.

PARKER: THE HUNTER & PARKER: THE OUTFIT

As I confessed the other day, I had never read a single thing by Darwyn Cooke prior to this year. Somehow the guy just sort of slipped under my radar for pretty much his entire career. I'd seen his artwork now and then, and I was aware of JUSTICE LEAGUE: NEW FRONTIER, but mostly he just looked like sort of a Bruce Timm clone to me.

Nonetheless, people seemed to love the guy's work. When he died unexpectedly last spring, I made a note that I would definitely check out something he'd done, with NEW FRONTIER at the top of the list. But instead, by way of the big Comixology IDW sale back in October, I wound up reading his PARKER graphic novels first.

Parker was created by the late Donald E. Westlake under the pen name of Richard Stark, as a sort of "anti-hero" in a series of pulp novels published over the course of forty years. In 2009, Cooke began a series of four adaptations of a handful of Perker's earliest stories. The first, THE HUNTER, follows career criminal Parker on a long, bloody trail toward revenge on a man who left him for dead and the return of some stolen monies he believes are rightfully his. Parker comes into conflict with "the Outfit", a nationwide crime syndicate, and by the story's end he's recovered his cash but made a very dangerous enemy of the Outfit.

THE ROCKETEER

"THE ROCKETEER" | "CLIFF'S NEW YORK ADVENTURE"
By Dave Stevens | Lettering by Carrie Spiegle | Coloring by Laura Martin

I've been aware of THE ROCKETEER for -- gosh, decades, I guess, since the movie came out in 1991. I suppose I would've been twelve at the time, and although I recall thinking the film looked interesting, it didn't interest me enough to see it. To this day I still haven't, though I gather it has a pretty strong following. Someday I'll check it out. But, at any rate: at some point between '91 and today, probably when I was in my teens, I learned that the character was originally a comic book, and that said comic was created by Dave Stevens.* I've wanted to read Stevens' original Rocketeer stories for years, and now I've finally taken the plunge.

I was surprised to learn, as I did a little research prior to writing this post, that (per Wikipedia) "The Rocketeer's first adventure appeared in 1982 as a backup feature in issues #2 and #3 of Mike Grell's Starslayer series from Pacific Comics. Two more installments appeared in Pacific's showcase comic Pacific Presents #1 and 2. The fourth chapter ended in a cliffhanger that was later concluded in a special Rocketeer issue released by Eclipse Comics." I had always sort of assumed this was an ongoing comic or a mini-series or something. Little did I realize it was a backup serial that jumped around between multiple comics over the course of years! And that's only the initial storyline, "The Rocketeer". The second tale, "Cliff's New York Adventure", was only three chapters long but took six years and a third publisher to run to completion.

So what was the deal? Was the story not popular enough to find an audience? This seems unlikely since there was a major motion picture adapted from Stevens' work and nowadays, IDW holds the ROCKETEER rights and routinely publishes various limited series starring the character. Was it plagued by bad luck? (i.e., were the series that carried it as a backup feature routinely canceled? I do know that both Pacific and Eclipse eventually folded, but I think that happened in the nineties.) Was Dave Stevens simply a slow or lazy artist, or perhaps uninterested in the character he'd created? I really have no idea -- but the fact is that Stevens created the Rocketeer in 1982 and drew his final Rocketeer story in 1996, and the end result is approximately 120 pages of material (that's roughly eight-and-a-half pages per year, averaged out).

SPRINGTIME GRAB BAG (IDW RETRO EDITION)

Last Fall, Comixology had a 50% off sale for their full IDW catalog. I'm not often big on digital comics outside of Marvel Unlimited, but I took advantage of this sale to check out a few things I've wanted to read for some time, as well as one series on which I did a spur-of-the-moment splurge. Somehow all of these items wound up being stories set in the past, hence the "retro" aspect of this review series.

Now, for the next four weeks beginning this Friday, I'll take a look at all those items in order of publication, beginning with the ROCKETEER comics of the eighties by Dave Stevens. The Rocketeer is a character I've had interest in for years, based as he is on the adventure serials of the thirties, but for whatever reason I've never actually checked him out. (I've never even seen the movie, despite its being released when I was twelve years old, pretty much the perfect age to get excited about it.)

Following the Rocketeer, we'll spend two weeks looking at Darwyn Cooke's four PARKER graphic novels, based on the character created by Donald E. Westlake and set in the sixties, when the novels were originally published. Much like the Rocketeer situation, I've never actually read anything by Cooke (though JUSTICE LEAGUE: NEW FRONTIER has been on my radar for several years now). Hopefully his adaptations of another writer's work will give me a decent idea of what he was all about.

Lastly is the splurge item -- HALF PAST DANGER, a mini-series by Stephen Mooney. I'd never heard of Mooney, but in stumbling across this series while perusing the IDW catalog, I decided I liked the artwork and I liked that, as with THE ROCKETEER, the series is influenced by adventure serials and is also set in the thirties.

So for the next few weeks we'll be heading back several decades to explore eras of Nazis, hard-boiled gangsters, and high adventure. And, once this is all done, it's entirely probable I'll stick with the retro theme for a few more months as part of this year's "Summer of..." project, so stay tuned.

THE UNBOXING - NOVEMBER 2016

Three books, three publishers, one titanic Unboxing.

First up, from IDW it's STREET FIGHTER X G.I. JOE, collecting the mini-series from earlier this year. I'm kind of surprised to see a STREET FIGHTER comic from a publisher other than UDON, but I guess since IDW has the G.I. JOE rights, they were able to get a limited license to publish this thing. STREET FIGHTER and JOE have, after all, been tangentially linked for decades, ever since Hasbro produced toys for the 1994 STREET FIGHTER movie by lazily repainting a bunch of their existing JOE molds into new toys that bore no resemblance to the characters they were meant to represent.

DC brings us the long-delayed SUPERMAN: THE MAN OF STEEL volume 9, at long last completing John Byrne's tenure on the character in trade paperback format. It's taken them about thirteen years to finally finish this for some reason, but at least it's done and now I can finally read the Byrne run in its entirety.

Interestingly, it looks like DC plans to plug along past Byrne's run as well, with a SUPERMAN: THE MAN OF TOMORROW Book One having popped up for pre-order on Amazon, picking up directly after Byrne's final issues with an apparent goal of filling the gap between the final MAN OF STEEL book and the DEATH OF SUPERMAN, which is already collected (and which I reviewed in Omnibus format here a few years back).

And lastly it's the SHANG-CHI, MASTER OF KUNG FU OMNIBUS volume 2. I don't know why this was delayed so long -- it was supposed to release back in September -- but I've waited quite some time already to read this classic material, so a little longer makes no difference. And don't forget Volume 1 is still out there, with Volume 3 on the way next year; not to mention the DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU OMNIBUS volume 1 and Volume 2 also available for pre-order! It's more martial arts mayhem in the mighty Marvel manner than anyone should be able to handle!

THE UNBOXING - SEPTEMBER 2016

As noted last month, my purchasing has dwindled quite a bit recently -- and while I don't necessarily mind, it makes for a mild annoyance when I don't have an Unboxing ready for a given month. I already skipped May of this year, and September was also going to turn up empty, which would've been a record around these parts.

So, even though I didn't get any newly released items from Marvel, DC, or the rest, I decided I would "unbox" a few things I already had. See, while I post all my monthly pre-ordered arrivals here, I do acquire other books throughout the year via gift cards, sales, etc. So today we'll take a look at a couple of items I've actually had for several months, thanks to some Christmastime Amazon gift cards: SPIDER-MAN: THE ULTIMATE NEWSPAPER COMICS COLLECTION volumes 1 and 2.

Released by IDW's imprint The Library of American Comics, these volumes collect all of the original syndicated Spidey strips by Stan Lee and John Romita, as published between 1977 and 1981. Marvel previously released this material themselves some years back in both hardcover and paperback format, but as I understand it, both versions had issues so I opted to skip them. But IDW has impressed me with their Library of American Comics offerings (more on that at some point in the future), so I decided to finally take the plunge.

There's a recently released third volume out there as well, collecting stripes beyond '81 by Lee with artistic contributions from Larry Leiber and Fred Kida. I plan to pick that up when the opportunity presents itself.

The Spider-Man strip has, in recent years (and for some time as my teenage recollections seem to recall) been... not great. But I really look forward to reading these "new to me" Lee/Romita Spidey stories, and you'd better believe that when I get to them -- most likely sooner rather than later -- I'll talk about them right here!

Available on Amazon: Volume 1 | Volume 2 | Volume 3

TRANSFORMERS: DEVIATIONS

Written by: Brandon Easton | Art by: Priscilla Tramontano
Colors by: Priscilla Tramontano & John-Paul Bove | Letters by: Tom B. Long
Edits by: John Barber | Publisher: Ted Adams

Set in the TRANSFORMERS: GENERATION ONE cartoon continuity, this one-shot features a "What If?" scenario springing out of TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE -- how would the film's events have played out if Optimus Prime had not died defending Autobot City from Megatron?

Writer Brandon Easton posits that things would have turned out more or less the same as they originally did, but with several more characters dying than in the movie. The entire chain of events springs from a point in the movie where Optimus Prime has the upper hand on Megatron, but the impetuous Hot Rod interferes in their fight when he sees Megatron reaching for a gun out of Prime's view. Here, Kup holds Hot Rod back and Prime dodges Megatron's laser blast, then blows the Decepticon leader's head clean off.

With Megatron dead, he and his followers are not transformed into heralds of Unicorn, which means this world features no Galvatron, and thus Galvatron does not kill Starscream for usurping his command. But when Unicron shows up, as in the movie, to devour Cybertron, Starscream confronts him and is transformed instead, into "Megascream". Megascrem and his minions attack an Autobot shuttle en route to Cybertron and when Hot Rod attempts a dangerous maneuver to outwit the Decepticons, the vessel is destroyed, taking Ultra Magnus, Springer, Arcee, and Perceptor with it.

Hot Rod redeems himself in the end, however, by grabbing the Matrix of Leadership from an injured Optimus Prime and sacrificing himself to destroy both Megascream and Unicron with its power. Thus the great Cybertronian war is ended and Unicron is finished.

DANGER GIRL: RENEGADE

Written by Andy Hartnell | Art by Stephen Molnar
Colors by John Rauch | Letters by Neil Uyetake | Edits by Scott Dunbier
Danger Girl created by J. Scott Campbell and Andy Hartnell

You know that feeling when you pick up an issue of a comic and realize you somehow missed the previous month's installment? That's the feeling one gets when reading DANGER GIRL: RENEGADE. It starts off straightforwardly enough, with a flashback to twelve years ago as we find a 13 year-old Abbey Chase in Cairo, under attack by a group of mercenaries. She and her guardian, David -- a friend of Abbey's missing father -- escape and move to Norway, but more mercs catch up with them there and David is shot, forcing Abbey to run and leave him for dead.

Issues 2 and 3 begin with similar flashbacks to Abbey's youth, one featuring her at age 16 in Tokyo with another of her father's contacts, while the third features 19 year-old Abbey searching for a treasure in Guatemala with a professor friend as well as her eventual rival (from the pages of DANGER GIRL: REVOLVER), Darren Cross. (And, in a nice touch, we learn here how Cross lost his fingertips as seen in his prior appearance.)

All this is well and good, fleshing out Abbey's past and revealing that she's spent years searching, off and on, for her missing dad. The confusion arises in the modern day storyline, which covers the remainder of the series' pages. We learn that the Danger Girl team disbanded under mysterious circumstances and that Deuce is missing. Abbey hasn't seen any of her former colleagues in over a year, and has gone back to her treasure hunting ways alongside international ne'er-do-well Dallas (featured previously in the prior two DANGER GIRL mini-series, TRINITY and MAYDAY).

SPRINGTIME GRAB BAG II

Before I get into this year's summer project (which, as noted previously, will be a bit shorter than the DANGER GIRL and STREET FIGHTER series I posted over the past couple years), we've got a few more "grab bag" items to close out the spring. The next couple Fridays will see a look at DANGER GIRL: RENEGADE, the latest installment in that franchise's ongoing world, and then IDW's TRANSFORMERS: DEVIATIONS one-shot, a "What If?" story set in the world of 1986's TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE. Then it'll be three weeks covering three relatively recent Marvel projects from Alan Davis in the writer/artist capacity.

Afterward it's on with that summer project, beginning mid-June, and that'll take things up into August, when this year's fall TRANSFORMERS series will begin. I've got the rest of the year planned out at this point, so I expect smooth sailing all the way through December.

THE UNBOXING - APRIL 2016

Four trade paperbacks this month, though one was delayed from March, as noted last time. From Marvel, we have a pair of Epic Collections: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: RETURN OF THE SINISTER SIX and IRON MAN: DUEL OF IRON. The former fits snugly between the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN EPIC COLLECTION: COSMIC ADVENTURES and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN EPIC COLLECTION: ROUND ROBIN books (I'm really happy with the amount of love David Michelinie's long Spider-run is receiving, as it's the Spider-Man I grew up with), while the latter follows directly from the very first Epic Collection, 2013's IRON MAN: THE ENEMY WITHIN (and for the record, it will only take one more IRON MAN Epic to bridge the gap between this volume and the previously released STARK WARS).

DC brings BATMAN ADVENTURES volume 4, closing out the original 36-issue run based on BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES. Hopefully these four books have sold well enough to warrant a couple follow-ups for the 25-issue BATMAN AND ROBIN ADVENTURES and perhaps even the subsequent 60-issue BATMAN: GOTHAM ADVENTURES -- though as of now I don't believe there's any word on whether that might happen.

And lastly, from IDW, it's the latest installment in the DANGER GIRL saga, DANGER GIRL: RENEGADE. I looked at every DG series to date a couple summers ago, and I plan to follow up with this volume in the near future.