Dark Horse Previews Picks: February 2014
Carrying on from last month, vol. 14 of “Eden! It’s an Endless World” is now available for pre-order on Amazon. I’ve got my copy and even if you don’t get your comics from them, I’d say now’s the time to pre-order yours.
As for stuff relevant to this month’s solicitations, there’s some curious management going on with one of their licensed titles. Only a few months after unveiling a new “Terminator” maxi-series by J. Michael Straczynski and Pete Woods, they’re putting out another six-issue miniseries, “Enemy of my Enemy,” from Dan Jolley and Jamal Igle. The premise is that one year after targeting Sarah Connor, Skynet sends a terminator back in time to take out a scientist whose discoveries threaten its future. Only there’s no Kyle Reese-type future soldier to intervene. Given that the Straczynski/Woods series deals with the Skynet war, it’s hard to see what value this is going to have to the franchise’s continuity.
Regarding its existence in the first place, I’m betting that they’ve got big expectations for the maxi-series and are launching this new one to capitalize on the buzz surrounding it. Of course, their recent “Terminator” miniseries didn’t set the sales chart on fire and the franchise’s comics heyday has long since come and gone. As is always the case with these things, expect “Enemy of my Enemy” to be instantly forgettable unless it’s very, very good.
Alabaster: Grimmer Tales HC: I picked up the first volume at Comic-Con after hearing good things about it from a friend of mine. It was certainly different, yet novel in several ways. Not only was it set in a rainy, decaying southern town where the apocalypse looked like it had already come and gone, the title’s protagonist, Darcy Flammarion managed to alienate the Angels whose bidding she was doing at the very start of the story. Darcy’s also unique in that she is utterly destitute and has to live hand-to-mouth in order to survive. Given that a lot of fiction that involves people fighting against the supernatural has their protagonists being either secretly wealthy or poor enough to take jobs of dubious quality it made for an interesting experience to observe someone several rungs below even that standard of living. So based on my experience there, I think I’ll go ahead and pick up this collection of Caitlin Kiernan and Steve Lieber’s stories from “Dark Horse Presents.”
B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth vol. 8 — Lake of Fire: When I saw that this collected issues #110-115, and #116 was also solicited here, I thought it was great to see that they were accelerating the release schedule like that. Then I remembered that trade paperbacks are always solicited two months in advance in these solicitations. Oh well, at least it means there are now TWO “B.P.R.D.” collections ready to come out in the coming months.
Conan the Barbarian #25: I’d heard that Brian Wood’s run on the title was going to wrap up around here and we get something of a confirmation here. Not only is it billed as the last issue of his “Queen of the Black Coast” adaptation, it’s mentioned in the solicitation text that we can look forward to a new “Conan” title from Fred Van Lente in the near future. Probably in the next solicitations. Van Lente is one of those writers at Marvel who has done a lot of good work there without ever managing a breakthrough success to take him onto the A-list (see also: Jeff Parker). As the writer of the “better than it has any right to be” “Marvel Zombies 3” and co-author of “The Incredible Hercules” (with Greg Pak), he’s written some comics I’ve enjoyed a whole lot and while we’ll have a better idea of his grasp of Conan once the miniseries he did with Ariel Olivetti is collected, I feel good about seeing him take over here.
King Conan vol. 3: The Hour of the Dragon: In other news, you can never have enough of the character when he’s being written by Tim Truman and illustrated by Tomas Giorello. NEVER!
Megatokyo Omnibus vol. 1: Ugh. The only reason this series got as popular as it did was because of Fred Gallagher’s art. He’s truly a talented artist, but the man’s storytelling is mired in the tropes of Japanese dating sims/visual novels/moe anime without finding any way to innovate in them. At least, that’s how I remember it being a decade ago. I was so unimpressed with what I read back then that I never went back after catching up with the archives. The most fun I’ve had with the series is seeing it mocked in much better webcomics like “Something Positive” and the late, great “Sexy Losers.” Anyway, this omnibus is notable since it appears that Dark Horse will be publishing the series again after Gallagher decamped to CMX some years back. That worked for a while… but you know what happened next.
Mind MGMT #19: From the solicitation text, “The second half of Matt Kindt’s MIND MGMT epic begins with just as many questions as the first!” Okay, the part about questions is not inspiring. What is interesting is the announcement that we’re past the halfway point in the title indicating it’ll be a 36-issue, 6-volume run. Now that I know this, and after the second volume turned out to be an improvement on the first, I think it may be worth hanging around to see how things wrap up.
Tomb Raider #1: Until earlier this year I had never really played a “Tomb Raider” game. There was that time I played the demo for the second game and that did a good job of putting me off the series, along with the marketing of Lara Croft as a kind of virtual sex symbol. Low-poly and early CG rendering has never been sexy. The reboot, however, took some cues from “Batman: Arkham Asylum” and placed Lara in a fascinating island to explore with lots of secrets to uncover and weapons and skills to unlock. Even if the game took a lot of cues from the “Uncharted” series, along with the regrettable fact that the last two put their most exciting sequences a good way before the end of their games, it was still a lot of fun and has me looking forward to the next game on next-gen hardware.
… Oh yeah, Dark Horse is publishing a new comic that takes off from this new continuity and is written by Gail Simone. Even though she’s been around for years and written a lot of reputedly great stuff, the only series of hers I’ve gotten around to reading has been “Secret Six.” That one was as good as its hype and if I’m going to judge her on that alone then this will be a great marriage of talent to material and worth reading when the collections arrive. I should also get around to picking up her “Deadpool” work too since I’ve heard no end of good things about that as well.