Angel & Faith #17

Last summer at MASSive Comic Con, someone was giving away some issues of this series, and I ended up with two consecutive issues. This is the first of those.

Title: Angel & Faith
Issue: 17
Date: 2012
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Writer: Joss Whedon, Christos Gage
Artist: Rebekah Isaacs
Colorist: Dan Jackson
Letterer: Richard Starkings, Comicraft's Jimmy Betancourt
Editor: Scott Allie, Sierra Hahn, Freddye Lins
Cover: Steve Morris

I really have no right to complain about this being hard to follow, given that I'm jumping into the series at issue #17, not to mention that it's an adaptation (continuation, really) of a show I've only ever seen one episode of. So this gets a pass from me on needing a scorecard to figure out who is who and what is going on.

There are basically two parallel stories happening. The first involves Angel and Faith doing some fairly standard detective work to try to figure out who stole the body of Giles during his funeral. This is with the intention of eventually resurrecting Giles.

Meanwhile, the second storyline has some sort of alternate-rules zombie bad guy deceiving a crew of young women (slayers?) with a promise to resurrect a dead friend of theirs. This half of the plot also features flashbacks to a group of young dabblers in the supernatural years back in London.

The interplay between Angel and Faith was strong, with some good dialogue, and nice progression on the unraveling of the mystery elements of the story.

Meanwhile, the battle between the bad guys and their (outmatched but scrappy) victims was enough to at least evoke some sympathy.

I wouldn't say this has me looking to go out and buy more of these, but I am looking forward to reading the next issue which I already have.

Rating: 5.5/10

WILDCATS #14

Here's a random issue from the backlog. No idea where (or why) I bought this.

Title: WILDCATS
Issue: #14
Publisher: Wildstorm / DC Comics
Date: October, 2009

Writer: Christos Gage
Penciler: Shawn Moll
Inker: Drew Geraci
Colorist: Carrie Strachan
Letterer: Wes Abbott
Editor: Kristy Quinn, Ben Abernathy

Cover: Ryan Sook

It's probably a bit unfair to try to jump into this at issue #14 with essentially no experience with the series. But then again, sometimes you have a single issue sitting around and you decide to read it. At least there was a convenient summary of the story-up-to-now on the first page.

It was a summary of a convoluted mess, but that was still better than no summary at all.

We jump right into the action with godlike bad guy Tao fighting not-quite-so-godlike good guy Spartan. We can conveniently keep score of this fight because Tao shoots green energy all over the place and Spartan shoots purple energy all over the place. Sadly neither of them turn their energy into giant boxing-glove shapes or anything, but I suppose that is probably best left to the various-colored-lantern books over in the regular DC universe.

In this Universe, the apocalypse has occurred and just about everyone has been wiped out. And the WILDCATS team is attempting to stop Tao from making a pretty dismal situation even worse. By the way, the CAT in the name stands for "Covert Action Team", despite them being about the least covert group I've ever seen. "WILD" stands for, well, "wild", I suppose. And the final "S" appears to be totally unnecessary because there is actually only one team.

So it's Tao against Spartan because Tao has essentially trounced everybody else before this issue got started, and there is a noble sacrifice that allows the heroes to escape and regroup. They decide to find another godlike being, a guy name Max Faraday, who turns out to be pretty uninterested in doing anything heroic. The team them tries various exceptionally effective ways of convincing him to help them such as yelling at him, insulting his manhood, and pointing a gun at him. We at least get one amusing moment when Faraday changes the gun into a rubber chicken.

Faraday actually turns out to be a reasonably interesting character (Spartan also seemed to have some potential, but in spite of him being in every scene, his personality doesn't come through as consistently as it could have). In the end, Faraday is revealed to be perhaps not as uncaring as everyone had assumed, and Tao is setting up for more mayhem.

The book started as a jumbled mess and improved a bit as it went on.

Rating: 4.5/10