Where fiction collides.
Miss out on your favorite comics while running around full of holiday cheer this season? Three new reviews are online at the Impulse Creations forums to catch you up to speed. Batman Inc., Hellboy: The Sleeping and the Dead, and Ratchet and Clank are on deck this time around.
Ex Machina is good, and I’m picky about my Wildstorm comics. Term Limits wowed me, but now that time is up for the series, you can catch up with the Brian K. Vaughan/Tony Harris-created story without worrying about a stack of new volumes overwhelming you.
You can read my review at Mookychick.
I’ve got a new gig lined up at Mookychick.co.uk, so be sure to support the website and check out my first article for them, a review of the North 40 graphic novel from Wildstorm.
For gamers, the exploits of Assassin’s Creed have transported them from the clutches of a modern day Templar facility to the bloodbath of the Third Crusade and more recently, Renaissance Italy. To complement November’s game release of Brotherhood, Wildstorm has pegged Karl Kerschl (Wednesday Comics, Adventures of Superman) and Cameron Stewart (Batman and Robin) to write and illustrate The Fall, a three-part series that tells of a troubled man named Daniel and the ancestor with whom he shares unusually vivid memories—a 19th-century Russian assassin named Nikolai Orelov.
As far as video game-based comic books go, The Fall is one of the better adaptations I’ve laid eyes on. Contrary to the common fate of most comics like this one, it seems that Kerschl and Stewart, who are equally credited for writing and artwork, approached their task with a fresh mind and clean slate—as though the source material they were handling wasn’t already rooted in a prominent medium to begin with, and could easily be tweaked and tinkered with to suit another. Color me impressed. The Fall #1 takes the time to structure and build its own narrative, even if that narrative is the snowier twin of Desmond/Ezio’s adventures and its red and white cloaked protagonist sports a more dashing and very blond mustache.
Readers who are unfamiliar with the video game series will probably need a minute or two before an important mental click happens: Daniel and Nikolai are linked through ancestry, and the former is reliving his blood relation’s turmoil through hallucination upon seeming hallucination. Kerschl and Stewart establish some interesting visual patterns that designate this shift from the often angry, drunk, and violent (or all three) Daniel to his Russian counterpart, and I love how certain colors bleed, sometimes quite literally, between these moments. The wild rings of their eyes, furious or startled depending on the situation, represent another connection between them that the creators were smart enough to show.
My only worry is that, for a series intended to run for a mere three issues, Daniel and his great-great-whatever haven’t been given enough time or room to grow into their characters. Nikolai isn’t exactly a top-notch assassin, and I was as surprised—though perhaps more pleasantly so—as he was when his train heist pulled a one-eighty and veered horribly off track. It’s hard to fathom how the story could reach any satisfying conclusion with such a small page count to work with, but for what it’s worth, The Fall doesn’t miss its mark by too wide a margin.
Ancient Roman vampires, apocalyptic horsemen-gangsters from Mexico (or possibly hell), and soul-hungry demons—monsters are coming out the wazoo this week at Impulse Creations.
Below are a few teasers, but you can read the full reviews here.
“David Hine dumps in all the right ingredients for a classic Darkness tale, lets it simmer, and before readers can catch their breath, they’re peering over a heaving pot of perfectly seasoned hellfire-side cuisine.” - The Darkness: Four Horsemen #1
“Fans of vampire fiction like True Blood might relish another half-naked glimpse into the undead world, but for those of us without a fang fetish, Ides of Blood does introduce a somewhat different means of examining the same old corpses.” - Ides of Blood #1
“Demons are creepy. Demons illustrated by Alina Urusov are even creepier. Unfortunately, the goosebumps-inducing demon in Witchblade: Due Process only adds a margin of the oomph the one-shot sorely needs.” - Witchblade: Due Process
