FIERCE
Written and Drawn by Jeremy and Robert Love
Published by Dark Horse

FIERCE is a terrific example of the type of neo-pop comics that read almost purely as a film put on paper. From the basic set-up onward, the book embraces its pop roots and plays the premise straight, creating a perfect mix of action, humor, and romance out of what could be a semi-ludicrous premise if done wrong.

Jonathan Fierce is a young Jamaican lad on the verge of trouble when he is first visited by the FBI. It seems they’ve learned of his gift: true psychic abilities. Now ten years later, he’s art of a kick-ass black ops team that uses his abilities to take out the worst of the worst. Until, that is, his entire team is killed and he’s saddled with the blame. Framed and on the run, he has only his wits and limited skills to carry him through… until the voices of his dead teammates begin to speak to him and even guide him using their skills. Suddenly, Fierce is a one-man strike team, and some bad dudes are in for a big world of hurt.

As I said above, what makes the book work as an entertainment is the total commitment to the premise. If Fierce himself was a character that you weren’t given the ability to invest in, or if he accepted hearing those voices as a natural progression of his powers, the whole thing would collapse under its own weight. But Fierce is a deeply conflicted and pained protagonist, a man haunted by his youth, his mistakes, those deaths, and his inability to be right 100% of the time with his abilities. On the flip side, he never becomes so maudlin about it all that you want to smack him and tell him to snap out of it. That’s some pretty nifty writing.

Artistically, the book looks dandy. The colors have the unfortunate effect of blurring some of Love’s panels and damaging some of his detail-work, but I have no complaints about the skill of the storytelling itself, which is paced nicely and keeps the book moving at a brisk pace.

FIERCE is, sadly, a rarity in today’s market, a title driven by a protagonist who is a man of color. If comics are to grow and survive in the modern marketplace, we need about twenty more books like it. It also helps that it’s quite good. Grade: A-

SIBAM?

Isn’t it about time for a new Black action hero?

FIERCE, as I wrote above, is a perfect film put on paper. But Hollywood’s unwillingness to put anyone besides Will Smith in the role of action hero is self-defeating. And, let’s be honest, his last few efforts haven’t been very good. Ice Cube is close to making that transition, but his comedies are far more successful. XXX 2 just tanked badly. There are so many talented actors sitting in Tinseltown waiting for the opportunity to play a role like Jonathan Fierce that it could make you cry. So I appeal to someone out there: snap up this book. Make this movie. You could do it for $40 million and make that back in a June opening weekend.

Come on. Who’s with me? Mos Def? Richard T. Jones? Shareef Atkins? Isn’t it time for a new star?

Isn’t it time?

FOUR LETTER WORLDS
Written and Drawn by Various
Published by Image Comics

Love. Hate. Fear. Fate.

16 stories by a ton of terrific creators, four stories for each word, and interpretation left to their discretion. It makes for an unusual, and excellent anthology.

Like most anthologies, there’s some inconsistency in the quality of the stories, but when this book is firing on all cylinders, some superior material makes it to the page. Chynna Clugston’s “Anew” is a sweetly romantic piece that’s balanced delicately by Eric Stephenson’s “Junk.” Joe Casey’s “Funk” is a nifty companion to Steve Lieber’s “Fell.” Amber Benson’s (who is oddly without the full creator bio everyone else gets) “Loss” plays nicely dark against the simple and snarky “True” by Jamie Rich. These stories actually appear in different “word” sections of the book, which helps define the purpose of the book and the way the concepts really don’t exist independently of each other.

Surprisingly, missteps come from such terrific creators as Scott Morse, Mark Ricketts, and Jeff Parker. They’re perfectly decent works, but they don’t mesh well with other stories in the volume.

FOUR LETTER WORLDS is a terrific book any way you look at it, though, and it’s well worth your time. I loved it, didn’t hate it, wasn’t afraid of it. It must have been fate. Grade: A

NINETY CANDLES
Written and Drawn by Neil Kleid
Published by Rant Comics

NINETY CANDLES is a project that could, quite easily, have left Neil Kleid flat on his face.

Kleid’s work here is a simple experiment: take one single panel with some underlying text and encapsulate a year in an artist’s life. The next panel continues with the next year of the artist’s life. And so on. The key is whether or not you can effectively tell a full and engaging story in this fashion. Can reading a single panel convey depth and movement in a person’s life? Can you build enough momentum to get a character from place to place with just a few lines of dialogue? In Kleid’s case, the answer is, with some bumps and bruises, “yes.”

CANDLES is mostly the story of Kevin Hall. We’re present for Hall’s birth, and we watch him grow into a young artist who falls victim to the work-for-hire system and loses the rights to his greatest character, a character who winds up making his publisher a lot of money through films and merchandise. (Choose your real life counterpart- there are plenty.) Along the way, we see him pass through marriages, births, deaths, and depression. And somehow, these individual panels make it work, and we get to know Kevin and what he’s all about as a man.

While some of the panels digress the story a bit, I think my primary objection (and it’s a small one) is the topic itself. We’re still seeing plenty of news to this day about older artists trying to reclaim their work and their characters, and Alex Robinson also did a nice job on a similar story in his epic BOX OFFICE POISON. What I’d like to see from Kleid is another work in the same experimental vein that gets the protagonist away from our little four-color paradise and explores new territory. He’s got that talent to do it; that’s obvious from what we see here. Grade: A-

JACK HUNTER: G.I. SPY EYES ONLY PREVIEW
Written by Andrew Cosby and Drawn by Matt Haley
Published by Atomeka Press

This one has been a long time coming. If memory serves me correctly, I think I first saw a promo piece for this book at San Diego at least two years ago. However, it looks like the wait is close to over.

The EYES ONLY PREVIEW presents the first thirteen pages of what will be a full issue one, and they’re tantalizing, indeed. JACK is set in World War II, and our lead is a suave looking (but somewhat of a dork) fellow who finds himself out of the soldier business and in the spy business. Unfortunately for him, he’s received only four weeks of training, and they’re throwing him out into the field to deal with a Nazi threat. It seems they’ve found something quite large that’s been buried in the Antarctic…

Jack acquires a female partner in the course of these pages, and she is, as required, impossibly gorgeous and far more competent than our title hero. Still, familiar trappings or not, G.I. SPY reads pleasantly enough, and it looks like it’ll be very entertaining by the time it’s finished. Hell, even if the story does a face plant into a hot concrete sidewalk, the one thing I do know for sure is that it’ll look gorgeous. Matt Haley is one of my favorite artists, and his stuff here doesn’t disappoint in the slightest.

I’m not overly comfortable grading something so obviously incomplete, but with thirteen pages of Haley art and three more pages of preview panels, it’s worth your time just to look and see how pretty it is. Kinda like Angelina Jolie. Grade: B+

DEAD @ 17: REVOLUTION #4
Written and Drawn by Josh Howard
Published by Viper Comics

Josh Howard brings his latest DEAD story to a close, and it offers a very surprising conclusion that would seem to mean that the adventures of Nara Kilday and her friends are complete.

When last we left the titular heroine, she was bravely walking into the lair of her enemy, the demon Bolabagg, with an unknown plan to destroy him once and for all. And Nara’s friends, Hazy and Elijah, were throwing caution to the wind and putting their lives and the life of their unborn child on the line to go to Nara’s aid. It was kind of a slow build through the first three issues, but issue four does a really terrific job of paying off.

Frankly, I wasn’t sure that would be the case. I had read Howard’s two previous DEAD series in trade paperback form only, so it wasn’t as noticeable that he took his sweet time building to any sort of climax; but through three issues, REVOLUTION was nicely done, but sloooooooooooooooow. Still, I found myself respecting just how far Howard was taking his concept away from its simpler roots, and giving it a grander context.

The stakes are at their highest here in part four, and the story does a good job of helping the reader feel the necessity for Nara to succeed. Howard amps up the action quotient, and he also ups the number of panels per page here and there, allowing the story to stay compressed rather than adding pointless pages to the end of the tale. It’s a smart play. It’ll be interesting to see how this story reads in trade and whether or not that affects how effectively it completes Nara’s story. Grade: B+

SUPER REAL #1
Written and Drawn by Jason Martin
Published by Super Real Graphics

Last year at San Diego, I received a preview copy of this book and reviewed it here. I found it pleasant and enjoyable enough, and I was definitely interested to see how the final product would turn out. I had to wait a while.

Creator Martin is finally ready to go with a full issue of his slice of high-concept comics. Five young people, all impossibly gorgeous and telegenic, have been chosen to receive super powers as part of their participation in a reality show. Martin describes his characters as “The Over Grown Club Kid,” “The Body Builder,” “The Go-Go Dancer,” “The Model,” and “The Black Sheep” which pretty much tells you that he’s taking direct satirical aim at the makeup of virtually every reality show on the air. However, he also adds some extra targets that don’t quite mesh with the rest of the story as well at this point.

Those targets would be the men he is playing as his network executives and showrunners. They include President Bush, Vice President Cheney, sitcom genius Larry David, and comics scribe Brian Bendis. Now, don’t get me wrong; each of these men is a welcome target, and his poke at Bendis is nearly lethal in it’s perfection; it’s just jarring to get all these parodies at once, and out of nowhere.

His best piece of satire comes at the expense of Paris Hilton, who is the obvious foundation of the model character. Making her famous as the spokeswoman for a popular line of douches is snide in ways I could greatly appreciate in my loathing for the real person.

Artistically, Martin can be inconsistent, but his semi-manga look and style plays well with the story he’s trying to tell. I’d like to see continued development there, as well as less of his public figure parodies, and see him get straight into the meat of his tale. I enjoyed this book, and I think it can find an audience and succeed and grow. Grade: B

SO THIS COMING SATURDAY…….

…is Free Comic Book Day.

The outward purpose of this little exercise is an attempt to create new comics readers by offering them a reason to come to a comics shop on a regular schedule and sample more of what the industry has to offer. So the general idea is for publishers interested in showcasing their wares to create an excellent entry that will grab the unknown person off the street and make them want more.

You’d be surprised how difficult that’s turned out to be for many companies.

Part of the issue is in what type of comics you want to try and sell more of. Companies like Marvel and DC tend to focus their FCBD efforts on books that are very child friendly. Nothing wrong with that. Some companies, like Oni, have produced two books for the “holiday”: one for kids, one for adults or more mature readers. Another excellent plan. But whichever way a publisher chooses to go, it doesn’t address some of the fundamental problems with the comics industry and its need to attract new readership.

The first problem is with the stores themselves. Look, there are some fantastic comics shops out there. No question. But for every James Sime, there are ten guys who run a store in the vein of Comic Book Guy from THE SIMPSONS. And no matter how many free comics a store like that gives away, those stores are still dominated by bad customer service, female-unfriendly surroundings, and a resistance to change (and non-superhero product). So if a mom takes her young daughter into a shop to get a free comic next Saturday, there’s still no reason for her to ever bring her kid back.

The second problem is in advertising the promotion well enough to actually get non-comics readers to go to a store and consider reading a comic. Therefore, many stores are simply stuck giving away free comics to people who already read and buy comics, defeating the point.

Yeah, I don’t know how to fix it, either.

I’ve read two of this year’s FCBD publisher entries. Image Comics has produced a dandy pamphlet reproducing stories from their FLIGHT anthologies. There are two stories in the book, both wonderfully drawn and extremely kid friendly (though they are easily enjoyed by an adult). I thought last year’s effort by Image, which contained a mish-mash of stories featuring everything from the kid-friendly INVINCIBLE to the not-so-friendly SPAWN, was one of the more poorly-conceived efforts, so seeing this excellent, excellent entry makes me very happy. It should be a huge success.

This year sees the first FCBD effort from Fantagraphics, and it’s a delicate mélange of artistic pieces meant for the mature reader. Assuming you could ever use the word mature when it comes to the work of the execrable Johnny Ryan, that is. Still, with incredible work from such alt-comix heavyweights as Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Ivan Brunetti, Peter Bagge, and Daniel Clowes, this is a perfect introduction for new readers looking for something lacking spandex to read. The idea of FCBD is to introduce your work to the broadest possible audience, and with eighteen short stories in this book, Fantagraphics has done it right.

See you in seven.

Review materials may be sent to: Marc Mason, P.O. Box 26732, Tempe, AZ 85285. You can also find me at Happy Nonsense and The Comics Waiting Room

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