Pallid Pachyderm Press

At a recent white elephant gift exchange, I got eight comic books that my colleague thought looked interesting but didn’t like enough to keep following their respective series. After reading them all I agree with his assessment, but they have a neat range of both triumphs and failures, so let’s dig in:

Future State: Catwoman #1 (Ram V and Otto Schmidt et al., DC)

So we’re in “Alleytown, Gotham, Several Years From Now” with some authoritarian faction herding people onto trains, one guy speaks up and gets brutalized, a bunch of the others have a slogan and a salute gesture but are still loaded onto the train. (It’s very weird to have a comic that’s fine with depicting fascism but won’t let the writer say “fuck.”)

We then cut to Catwoman and co. plotting out a train breach, and shoutout to this Cheshire Cat character with a fun goofy mask, I hope they get more of a spotlight in future issues. Catwoman breaches the train with the help of accomplices on the inside, and then frees a guy named Onomatopoeia who narrates all his own sound effects, which rules - you can tell they had a lot of fun delving the vaults of weird Batman side characters.

Throughout the issue there’s been some chatter about Batman being allegedly dead, and one of the guards breaks off to go inspect their highest-security prisoner, so of course she’s Talia Al Ghul and the prisoner is Bruce Wayne. The comic has a nice moody deep-blue-and-red palette, though the actual story was pretty bland - given that this was starting off a weird future timeline, I was expecting at least one jarring shakeup, but the plan worked fine and the status quo is on its way back. Oh well.

Sudden Death #1 (Alexander Banks-Johnson and Robert Ahmad et al., Scout Comics)

We’ve got some cool stylized, monochrome art on a story I don’t really get. We’ve got a dismal slice-of-life for the first two-thirds of the story, about a depressed suicidal man trying to reform himself enough to regain visitation rights for his daughter. Then he gets hit by a truck, nearly dies, but makes a full recovery in five hours, drawing crowds cheering him on as an immortal superhuman. Then we cut to a woman coming home from work whose husband explodes in his chair, she sees a news report about the immortal man, To Be Continued.

While I get that the intrusion of the supernatural needs a status quo to disrupt, I don’t think the two halves of this were integrated very well, but I hold out hope that future issues will delve into how much powers and attention can fuck someone up and why the hell that guy exploded. A promising, if rocky, start to a series.

Fall of X: Astonishing Iceman #1 (Steve Orlando and Vincenzo Carratù et al., Marvel)

 

A helpful blurb on the copyright-info page brings you up to speed: there was some event called the Hellfire Gala attacked by some anti-mutant group called Orchis, and now all mutants are either in hiding or presumed dead. (I get the sense that this is a fairly normal X-Men plotline, but it’s made much funnier by having a villain faction whose name means “testicles.”)

We open with an Orchis (heh) nanomachine attack on the Castro District, because Mr. Orlando knows that subtext is for cowards. We focus on a guy who used to take a drug that mimics mutant powers but still gets targeted by the X-gene-seeking drones, which is honestly a pretty neat angle of even temporary, commercialized mutations drawing the wrath of Orchis (heh).

Iceman shows up, stops the drones, kisses the guy (though since he doesn’t even get a name, I have no idea if Iceman has any history with him) and disappears. Cut to Orchis (heh) in their space-station base, with a bit of office-politics banter and Demanding Results.
 

Iceman returns to his Antarctic ice fortress, expositing to his ice-minion about how he nearly died at the Gala but was painstakingly reassembled by his mutant boyfriend Romeo. We get a cute scene of him being concerned for Iceman, and end with Orchis (heh) planning another trap. (With one page of just a plaintext email, formatted like the copyright page was? Damnedest thing.)

I like the range of ice-blues and Orchis (heh) reds, even if the art style doesn’t blow me away. It’s a good setup with some quality gay dysfunction, though I can’t say I’m craving to see where this goes.

Children of the Comet #1 (Damian Connelly and Gabriel Kikot et al., Sumerian Comics)
My copy apparently has ‘Cover A,’ and I’m not convinced it’s a good idea to start out an indie series with the expense and identity-dilution of multiple covers. Cover A is perfectly fine, anyway - we’ve got dark grayscale characters in profile against a red thunderstorm sky with a cool descending-slope composition. We open with an alien-headed guy at a typewriter, and two God-damned pages of plaintext exposition. Mr. Connelly. Please. I liked Watchmen too, but that prose was much smoother, more plausible as in-universe media, and came after the compelling story hooks. Come on now.

TL;DR: it’s 2025. Halley’s Comet grants a few people superpowers (with drawbacks) whenever it passes Earth. The most infamous of them was Armando Kinkaid, who could absorb the souls of other Children of the Comet. The narrator tried sheltering two of them, but Kinkaid still devoured one of them and the other one defeated Kinkaid at a great price. Direct quote: “a new comet society (an evil one)”. The narrator is a Professor X-type mentor and quasi-sellout. etc. etc. etc.

I get the sense that the author has been building up this world for A While, is uncertain how long he’ll have this series, and blew his entire load right off the bat. Tragically, this makes me much less invested when I already know so many plot beats and have this little faith in his storytelling skill. The art has a similar problem of theoretically-cool ideas with bad execution. Kikot is clearly fond of Mike Mignola, and the character designs are good in isolation, but my eye keeps sliding off the dark, muddy compositions. I want to like this book, and it has some real potential, but as-is it’s just deeply underwhelming.

Fall of X: Jean Grey #1 (Simonson and Chang et al., Marvel)
This is in the same continuity as Astonishing Iceman, but there’s hardly any trace of Orchis (heh). I like this change of focus - it gives more space to the mutants’ own strife and other political threats, which is fitting for the X-Men’s messy dynamics. The recap blurb tells me to read X-Men: Hellfire Gala #1 before this issue, which I resent - this is the first of its series, you already have a recap blurb, I have every reason to expect a reasonably self-contained storyline.

The comic itself is some neat psychodrama with Jean using her powers in dubiously-ethical ways to ostensibly help mutantkind. I like the grappling with the moral horror of nonconsensual psychic power usage, especially how it intersects with debates of appeasement versus rebellion. The art is still firmly Marvel House Style, but with a nice red- and metallic-leaning palette that makes it feel distinct from Iceman. I like the thorny infighting on display, even if I don’t know the full context and haven’t been hooked.

Drips (Chad Taylor et al., Uni5i Comics)

This is the most indie of the bunch by a long shot. It’s 12 pages in all, including outer and inner covers, with art on par with semi-amateur webcomics. Still, there’s an admirable set of paneling choices and action shots that make me excited to see what this artist can do with a couple years more practice. It’s not a bad premise, either, but it just isn’t communicated that well either. Oh well.

eJunky (Nicholas Tana and Kyle Faehnrich et al., Scout Comics)

Not groundbreaking, but a fun cyberpunk romp about recording and selling experiences and the risks of willfully entering Plato’s Cave. I like the art style, but the compositions can be a bit too dark and over-detailed to read clearly. The philosophizing is on the level of high-school rambling, but the art and story were both just compelling enough to keep me invested. Good use of sudden palette shifts, too.

Fall of X: Uncanny Avengers #1 (Gerry Duggan and Javier Garròn et al., Marvel)

Jesus Christ. So, the Big Two’s main advantage over indies (beyond, like, the buckets of Warner Bros/Disney money) is having enough cultural reach that pretty much everyone already knows the gist of Batman and Superman and Spider-Man, letting authors shortcut exposition or mess with expectations. This comic squanders that. Issue 1 of a series and we’re already waist-deep in lore, politicking, and intrigue that I find exhausting to even contemplate. The recap blurb doesn’t assign homework, because the comic itself does in a footnote just six pages in. Deadpool is here, making some limp gestures toward comic relief. There’s a guy who may or may not be Cyclops. Though there are some neat panel layouts, the palette is all over the place. For anyone who thinks of cape comics as incomprehensibly inbred, this won’t change your mind.