Avatar: The Last Airbender: Free Comic Book Day 2014 All Ages

Title: Avatar: The Last Airbender: Free Comic Book Day 2014 All Ages
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Date: May, 2014
Writer: Gene Luen Yang, Art Baltazar, Franco, David Lapham
Artist: Faith Erin Hicks, Art Baltazar, David Lapham
Colorist: Cris Peter, Lee Loughridge
Letterer: Michael Heisler, Nate Piekos of Blambot
Editor: Dave Marshall, Scott Allie, Jim Gibbons, Shantel LaRocque, Daniel Chabon

Three stories, featuring Avatar: The Last Airbender, Itty Bitty Hellboy, and Juice Squeezers respectively.

The Avatar story has Suki and Sokka dealing with the sexist owner of a collectible seashell shop, in an amusing commentary of the "fake geek girl" trope. The initial action is satisfying in a jobber-squash-for-a-good-cause kind of way, but the ending of the story is quite good and shows some real heart.

Itty Bitty Hellboy has some fun trying to teach a ghost how to do his job, and also plays on the old "cough syrup for the coffin" joke. Not much to it, but I give credit for bringing up a classic dad-joke I got told as a kid.

The Juice Squeezers story involved some kids braving a nest of giant ants to exact a bit of revenge on the local school bullies. I'm not clear on why there are giant ants, but the story did a decent job of representing the "kids on bikes" subgenre (ET, Goonies, Stranger Things, etc). I'd be interested in seeing what this series does when it has more to work with in the way of plot.

Rating: 6/10

Fight Club: Free Comic Book Day 2015

My third review from my FCBD stack this year is another of the official Free Comic Book Day releases, this time from Dark Horse Comics.

Title: Free Comic Book Day 2015
Date: May, 2015
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Writer:Chuck Palahniuk, Eric Powell, David Lapham
Artist: Cameron Stewart, Eric Powell, Mike Huddleston
Colorist: Dave Stewart, Dan Jackson
Letterer: Nate Piekos of Blambot, Clem Robins
Cover: David Mack (front cover), Eric Powell (back cover)
Editor: Scott Allie, Sierra Hahn, Shantel LaRocque

Three stories here, headlined by Chuck Palahniuk's official sequel to Fight Club. The Fight Club story jumps right into where the novel left off. The writing is sharp, but there wasn't a lot of new material here, probably intentionally because this was aimed at a general audience, not all of whom would be familiar with the original book or the movie. It definitely kept the flavor of the original, but it really only teased the new directions that the sequel would be taking.

The Goon, on the other hand, was a complete short story, and a very amusing one at that. A bit of monologue by the Goon about vampires during the climactic scene is priceless. Definitely the best read out of the three stories here, and it stands up very well on its own.

The third story was from Guillermo Del Toro's The Strain. This is a prequel to the main storyline, and it's set in the 1960s. It involves a man with a rare book to sell, treacherous intentions, and predictable results. It is well told, but nothing all that original.

Rating: 6.5/10

The Strain #1

Special $1 introductory issue released a few weeks ago.

Title: The Strain
Issue: 1
Date: 2011
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Writer: Guillermo Del Toro, Chuck Hogan, David Lapham
Artist: Mike Huddleston
Letterer: Clem Robins
Colorist: Dan Jackson
Editor: Jim Gibbons, Sierra Hahn

Comic adaptation of the first novel of a trilogy by film director Guillermo Del Toro and writer Chuck Hogan. David Lapham adapts the story to script.

The opening flashback is standard vampire fare, with a young boy in Romania in 1927 hearing a local legend from his grandmother.

Flash forward to the present and there's a plane quarantined on the tarmac at JFK with all communication cut off and a bioterrorism response team en route. CDC doctor Ephraim Goodweather finds all but three passengers dead in an incident that apparently lasted only six minutes.

All of this is a reasonable prologue for what seems to be a full-scale vampire apocalypse. Like the investigators themselves, I'm left trying to figure out how things transpired on the plane, and it makes for a pretty engaging mystery.

Doctor Goodweather comes off as rather generic as main characters go. The other main character, Abraham Setrakian, seems a bit more interesting, but the present-time version of him just gets a tease in the last two pages.

This issue did a nice job of setting the scene, but other than the opening flashback, there the story felt like it was all setup and no depth. The arrival by plane was a nice variant on the events of Dracula, but the really interesting aspects that will distinguish this from other vampire stories are not yet apparent.

Rating: 6/10