REVIEWS BY PEDRO CABEZUELO
Vertigo launches American Vampirewith style and, thanks to the presence of Stephen King, much fanfare. Issue one is broken up into two stories; the first takes place in 1925 and introduces Pearl Jones, an aspiring actress in Hollywood who
gets more than she bargained for when she attends a swanky party hosted by a big-shot producer. The second story, written by King, takes place in 1880 during an attempted escape by a notorious freshly captured bank robber named Skinner Sweet. The connection between the two tales is merely hinted at (take another glance at the comic’s title for a clue) but it’s obvious there’s a lot more to be revealed. Rafael Albuquerque’s art is excellent in both stories, and he does a great job of giving each tale a different look and feel. A solid start to what will hopefully be a landmark series.
Now this is more like it. A few months back I reviewed the first issue of Strange
(RM#97), a miniseries that relaunched Doctor Strange into the Marvel Universe, which was very weak, for the most part. Con- versely, The Mystic Hands of Doctor Strange #1 pays homage to Marvel’s 1970s black and white magazines and evokes the pe- riod and style per- fectly. The one-shot issue contains three stories, the best of
which is by Peter Milligan and classic Strange artist Frank Brunner, in which a man comes to the Doctor to help him forget the guilt he carries over the accidental death of his wife. The story completely captures the essence of Doctor Strange – ethereal and menacing yet with everyday human emotions firmly grounding the action. Kieron Gillen and Frazer Irving’s tale also impresses, and even Ted McKeever’s works, if only because it’s so differ- ent from the previous two. Hopefully, Marvel will continue to release sim- ilar projects: a black and white Ram- paging Hulk one-shot would be fantastic.
I really wanted to like Zombies vs. Robots Aventure. I love zombies, I love robots and I love comics – easy sell! Unfortunately, while the concept is promising, the execution just doesn’t work. ZVR
Aventure #1 is comprised of three stories set be- fore and during the great Zombie/Robot War. However, rather than three com- plete stories, what we have are the opening install- ments of three larger
stories.
While this may work in the long run, the structure of each eight-page segment is weak and the conclu- sions come sud- denly and without
suitable climaxes. Of the three, only the second tale – in which a janitor discovers a lab filled with abandoned robots – works, primarily due to Paul McCaffrey’s excellent art. Still, in the end, the reader is left with three first acts that just hang there, with little to entice one to read on.
Niles and Wrightson are at it again. After their noirish,
monster-filled Dead, She Said (see review in RM#98) comes this three-issue series about an LA detective who teams up with a Frankenstein mon- ster-like federal agent to solve the mystery of a seem- ingly ageless Hollywood star- let. The Ghoul #3 ties up the story in typical Wrightson
fashion, with plenty of blood and tentacles on display. Like Dead, this book is a lot of fun, and
manages to be a pastiche of both de- tective and horror stories, without being conde- scending to either. Niles and Wrightson are slowly creating their own macabre universe (there’s a cameo here by a character from Dead), and there are plenty of hints in this issue that there’s more in store from this great col- laboration.
The characters that inhabit the fictional Greek Street (in the title of the same name) may
seem a tad familiar. There’s a boy who un- knowingly has sex with his mother and inad- vertently causes her death, a girl who foresees disaster and is believed by no one, and a blood- seeking Fury out to avenge her own murder from be- yond the grave. Peter Milligan calls up iconic Greek legends and gives them a modern twist while teasing that there may be more of a connec- tion to the myths. Greek Street is not an easy read, though, in the first two issues alone we’re introduced to a large cast that’s hard to keep track of, and Davide Gianfelice’s art, while well executed, has a habit of making many of the characters look alike. Luckily, this volume collects the first five issues in one handy tome, making it a smoother, more satisfying read.
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