My Name Is Bruce, 2008.

I bought the My Name is Bruce one-shot a couple of months ago, and I've gotta tell you, it was pretty awesome.

This book is actually an adaptation of a movie by the same name, which I was rather shocked to hear about. Normally, this kind of movie is right up my alley and I have advanced notice of it before it hits the theaters. It's your classic "actor thinks he's acting, but it's a real situation" scenario.

I've actually met Bruce Campbell and he is an awesome human being. It was at a book reading for his autobiography, and he's just a cool dude. His book is very good, I HIGHLY recommend it; his story is very interesting, because he doesn't claim to be a movie-star, in fact, he professes to be quite the opposite; he describes himself as a working-class actor.

Anyway, this book is a one-shot and, like I mentioned before, it's an adaptation of the movie, and the plot is your basic "movie-star thinks he's filming a movie when it's actually a real event". I know, it's a tired plot plotline, but it works and, I mean, it DOES star Bruce Campbell, so if you're not prepared for a decent amount of cheesy antics, you are really reading the wrong comic/watching the wrong movie.

Sidenote: this was published by Dark Horse, and it is pretty shocking to read real curse words in a comic book; check the page to the right. I guess I'm kind of used to seeing the super-lame "####" whenever characters "curse" in mainstream books. My personal thoughts on the matter are; if you can't cuss in a comic book without being censored, don't do it. It's just lazy writing. Really, any effect you're going for is diminished when you see something like, "HOLY ####" in a word balloon. Moon Knight is probably the biggest offender, and I know that's supposed to be an edgier book, but if Marvel is going to censor you every time you do it, think of something else. Hell, MAKE-UP a curse word, I don't care, it's just annoying to pound marks everywhere. But this book doesn't have any of those problems, because the curse words are used rather liberally.

Anyways, Bruce is abducted and brought to a town to fight Guan-di, the Chinese god of war and protector of the dead. The only problem is, Guan-di is real, and Bruce thinks that he is filming a movie. Of course Bruce (in the comic/movie) is a pretty sleazy character, and he runs screaming when he finds out that Guand-di is real. Ghosts, explosions, gunfire, fist fighting and bean curd (Guand-di's only weakness) are all involved in the telling of the story and of course at the end, Bruce turns into the hero we all know and love. There's also the obligatory "death scence" where Bruce is thought to be dead, only to stumbled out of a pile of rubble to deliver a couple of wise-cracking one-liners.

All-in-all, it was a pretty fun book and I enjoyed it an awful lot. The art was pretty good, and even though it followed a movie script, it was written very well and it packed a lot of stuff into 32 pages. There was also a very nice balance of action, back story and humor that made it a very fun read. I saw copies of it for months after it was released so you could check your local comic book store, or try eBay. It's really fun and I wouldn't mind Bruce getting his own series. I'd add it to my pull-list.

One last thing: according to wikipedia, there is a sequel planned intitled My Name is Still Bruce. I have one thing to say to that: sign me up for some more.

The End League.

So, about two months ago, I wrote about Knights of the Old Republic and how I had bought a run off of eBay. Well, the guy I bought it from decided to throw in a bonus issue of The End League. I finally got around to reading last week, and I'm now hooked on that series as well.

What's really interesting about the series is that it's basically the opposite of what every super-hero comic is about. Normally, the Good Guys always beat the Bad Guys and the status quo is always maintained. Well, in this series, the Good Guys have lost. What's left is The End League, and they're still trying to save the day, even when the odds are massively stacked against them.

::SPOILER WARNING::
What's also pretty cool about it is that the main character was actually mainly responsible for the way that things are. He's the big guy at the bottom of this post; Astonishman. He was tricked into triggering "The Green Event" by his archenemy, "Dead" Lexington. The Green Event ended up giving superpowers to every one person out of ten thousand. Astonishman put together a group of super-heroes called the Squadron of Righteousness to help save the planet as well as fight villains that chose to use their new powers for evil. Twelve years before the current story, most of the world's super-villains banded together and killed a majority of Squad, and those who survived went into hiding and reformed as The End League.

So it's a pretty cool concept. It kind of reminds me of Star Wars and how most of the original trilogy was about people just surviving and trying to fight back against an evil empire. It's also similar to what I liked about The Umbrella Academy in that there is a large gap in the story, so they hint at certain events that have happened and they go back and tell certain parts of the history. It also has a lot of Super-Hero archetypes that have been turned on their heads. For example, Astonishman is obviously Superman, and he caused the whole situation. He deals with a lot of guilt. There is also a Captain America type character, who also has to deal with the guilt of killing his side-kick while he was possessed by his arch-nemesis. So it's interesting how these characters would have to deal with things if they made a mistake and ended up on the losing side of things instead of always on the winning side.

Most of the story is about the team trying to survive. The world has been divided up by the major villains into territories, and they are all now slums. So the team basically focuses on surviving, and their one standing mission is to find Thor's hammer. Turns out that Thor went missing during The Green Event and is presumed dead; his hammer, which is the only thing that can turn this whole situation around, is also missing.

One kind of shocking aspect of the series (WARNING: MAJOR SPOILER) is that they kill off the main character in the second issue. That's right, Astonishman is killed by reanimated Thor and the hammer is taken by someone who has yet to be revealed. I think that was a pretty bold move by the creators, but it works because, again, this is not your normal comic book. And Astonishman will be back, well, at least in the flashbacks. So there's that to look forward to.

There's an interesting page at the end of the first issue. It's written by the writer, Rick Remender, and it basically explains the series, how it came to be, and how long it took to get off the ground. There's an interesting paragraph in there about how hard it is to develop a series about Super-Heroes outside of Marvel or DC. It took them five years from the initial idea to the first issue. (Here's a different interview with the creative team with plenty of preview art)

So, to wrap this up, I really like this series, and I'm pretty impressed with what Dark Horse has been doing lately. They're really going out of their way to break away from what they were doing for decades (licensing existing properties) and they're really taking some risks. I highly recommend The End League, the only downside is that it will probably take some work to find back-issues, a lot of shops are just now adjusting orders to demand. I had to buy issue #2 off of Things From Another World, and they still have plenty of back issues so I recommend them as a back-up if your local shop is out. Dark Horse is also releasing a trade in December, which I think collects the first four or five issues and it is moderately priced. Go out there and buy it already, I promise you, it's a very entertaining book.

Darkhorse

There's a very interesting article over on Apple's site about Dark Horse's production department. As a graphic designer, I think this is pretty cool and I was rather shocked to hear that they started producing their stuff on computers as far back as 1989. If I only lived in Milwaukee...

I'm actually going to have a couple of upcoming posts about Dark Horse. I really like what they're doing and lately I've been picking up a couple of their titles. They're putting out some good stuff.

The Umbrella Academy.

So, I've got a secret to reveal today; I recently bought The Umbrella Academy Trade about a week ago. And it's really, really, really, really good. I've actually read it twice and I really want to read it a third time, but I might lend it to someone instead.

I had heard good things about it, but I had massive reservations about it because of who was involved in the project. If you don't know, it's written by Gerard Way, and if you don't know who he is, well, you should really get out of the house more often. He is the lead singer of My Chemical Romance. I hate his band, but I love his comic. It's been a very pleasant surprise and I actually can't wait until the next series comes out. It's THAT good.

As I said, a lot of people are saying good things about it, but then I heard him talking about it on the radio. Then, while I was reading Knights of the Old Republic, I saw an ad for the series (see the picture off to the right further down). The ad prominently features "Spaceboy" and it peaked my interest because I noticed that Space has the body of a gorilla. If you've got gorillas, or even half-gorillas involved in your comic, I'm in.

Turns out, there are zombie robots, talking chimpanzees, and space travel in the first story arc, which are four out of my top five favorite things to look for in a comic book (Ninjas are the fifth thing. And I count Zombies and Robots as two separate entries on the list). The plot device is pretty simple, but effective, and I found myself starting to think about all of the possibilities that the series has. It's pretty limitless. But in a good way.

A little backstory (don't read the following if you don't want any spoilers); twenty years ago, there was an event where 43 births occurred to women that showed no previous signs of being pregnant.

A well known Olympian and Nobel Prize Winner (and upon re-reading it, also an alien), Sir Reginald Hargreeves, aka; The Monocle, set out to adopt as many of the children as possible. He succeeded in adopting seven of them and formed the Umbrella Academy to raise them. It turns out that they all have super powers and he grooms them into a super team.

The cool thing about the plot device is that there is a mix of flashbacks and the current time line (twenty+ years after "the event"). There's also a member of the Academy that can time travel and has been missing for about 10-15 years, so you have that thrown in the mix too. I really like how it was set up with a short history of the group, then it included their first adventure, and then it flashed to the present. The team hasn't been together for a very long time, some of them have drastically changed, and one of them is dead. Like a family would, they all interact with each other differently. The writing is really quite real. They end up gathering for the first time in several years for the death of their father, and every member of the team has a different opinion of their adopted alien father.

The gaps really draw you in because they way it's presented, you REALLY want to know what the hell happened to the team. And that's what I like about it. There's a whole lot of back-story that needs to be addressed. They give that to you, but of course they don't give it to you all at once. So they have to fill in that twenty year gap, and then there's the time travel story that has to be told (one line I liked was when when someone asked the time traveling kid about what happened or what he had to do to get back to the present time, he answered, "Well, I guess I should start with the Kennedy assassination..." and then of course something happened and they didn't get to it. Don't think I haven't forgotten about that though. I WANT TO KNOW!), so with all of that, there's a lot of possibilities and a lot of different ways that the series could go.

It's also refreshing that it's a brand new mythology. I think Invincible has succeeded in part due to this because there are brand new characters in a brand new universe. They're not established properties with a whole lot of back story where, as a writer, you're going to offend huge chunks of your readership if you try and do something different. I think a lot of the big publishers and writers who work with the big publishers get locked into doing certain things with established characters because that's how things have been done with that character for 40-50 years. Case in point, look what happened with Spider-Man and the "Brand New Day" story that completely shook things up; there was big time backlash from the readers, even though the Spider-Man franchise was extremely stale at that point. Again, I think the reason why Invincible and The Umbrella Academy are so good is because no one or nothing is really safe, and if it's done the right way, you're left hungering for back story. Lately, they've tried, but I really don't get the same feeling when I read Wolverine stories, I know he's going to survive, and if he "dies" (which kind of happened a couple of story arcs ago in the regular Wolvie series) you know he's really not dead permanently. I mean, especially in the Marvel Universe, everyone's "Marvel Dead" until there's a definitive answer to the question, and even after that, they can still come back, (i.e. - Colossus). I have part of a post written about that very subject, at some point I'll get around to publishing it.

I guess what I'm trying to say it that I think when you start something from scratch, there's a certain level of freshness involved that gets people excited. And that's what is going on with The Umbrella Academy. It's a very interesting move for Dark Horse, because they've pretty much made their living off of licensed properties for the last 15-20 years, so this is a very radical departure for them. It seems to have paid off, and I hope they make more decisions like this.

I also think that it's success partially comes from the fact that Gerard Way is who he is, but I think even more than that, it's successful because he's a new voice. One of the reasons I think I really like it is because it's not just "this writer" with "that artist" starting a run on an "established super-hero series". It's a first time writer and a relatively new artist. So it's just totally new. And totally good.

Anyways, the next installment of The Umbrella Academy is set for a November 26th release, and I cannot wait. I highly recommend picking up the trade to get started though, you WILL NOT be disappointed.

Knights of the Old Republic.

I've recently been reading the Knights of the Old Republic series by Dark Horse and I am really enjoying it a lot. I think about a year ago at the Star Wars Celebration, Chris' brother Andrew let me read some of the comics he had with him when we were waiting in line, and one of them was the first issue of the series. So then I bought the first trade paperback off of Things From Another World for well under ten dollars because it was in their "Nick and Dent" section. I read it and thought it was pretty good, so I kept a lookout for the second trade, and a couple of weeks ago it popped up in their Nick and Dent section so I scored it for six bucks.

It was the second trade that really got me hooked.

I just bought issues #14-25 off of eBay and they arrived yesterday, so I'm just starting to catch up the rest of the way. I bought some back issues to fill some holes and then had to make a purchase at TFAW.com to fully catch up.

If you're unfamiliar with the series, it actually takes place in the same time line as the video game series, but it's set about eight years before the events in the first game. So if you know what happens in the game, I think eventually this series will set that up rather nicely. At least I hope it will. They've introduced a couple of characters that were major characters in the games, so that's why I say it will eventually fill in the details to setup the video game.

It's a pretty cool series and it takes a lot of the themes that have already been beaten to death in the Star Wars Universe and kind of flips them on their head. Without giving too much away, the main character is named Zayne Carrick and he is not your typical Jedi. Normally, Jedi are strong, confident and in charge. Zanyne...well, he's really not like that at all. He was basically about to fail out of the Jedi Order when he was betrayed.

Speaking of betrayal, that is another theme with a twist. Normally in the Star Wars Universe, betrayal involves a student betraying a Master. In this series, the Masters betray the student(s). Zayne survives and he is forced to become a rogue Jedi. I read something online about how the writers always wondered what would have happened if Luke had become a smuggler and traveled around the galaxy with Han and Chewie getting in and out of trouble. And that's really what it feels like when you read it. It really does have an Episode IV kind of a feel to it.

So, one of the other things it really has going for it is that Zayne has to figure out on his own how to be a Jedi. With every issue they keep developing his character and he slowly gains more and more confidence in his skills. He has a great group of friends and they are always getting involved in some kind of caper; there's always some comedy mixed in with the action, which I always think is a good thing. There's also the mystery behind the group of Masters that betrayed him that is slowly being revealed, so there's a little bit of a detective/mystery vibe going on. I think it all mixes together into a great formula for success. This series debuted in 2006 and it was part of a couple of comics that Dark Horse had released that year to try and breath new life into a 20-year-old series that had grown very stale and repetitious. I personally really enjoy the series and want to catch up quickly so I can read the new issues each month. So check it out if have the chance and definitely try and pick up the back issues. I think they're just getting to release the fourth trade, which collects issues #19-24 in September/October. I highly suggest seeking this one out, especially if you're a Star Wars nerd like I am.