A Monstrous Rundown

Guess what I noticed all of the comics in this article have in common?  Sure, some of them are big and obvious, others are human-sized and hide in the shadows.  Others just fit the bill from a certain point of view.  How many of them are actually worth your time?  Read on and find out.

I was hoping that Godzilla Heist would be about a group of criminals or ne’er-do-wells who took advantage of the chaos caused in one of the Big G’s attacks to stage their own robbery.  Writer Van Jensen doesn’t give us that; instead, serving up a main character with the somewhat implausible ability to direct the kaiju and getting roped into a job that will allow him to settle a longstanding personal grudge.  It’s less fun than it sounds with a mostly forgettable cast of characters, twists you’re likely to see coming from a mile off, and a finale that goes way too big for its own good.  Kelsey Ramsay’s ridiculously gritty art is perfectly decent, but the whole package is disappointing as a whole.

You’d think that putting a food truck in a post-apocalyptic setting would make for a good story.  Between Ghost Pepper vol. 1:  Flavors of Ash and “Crazy Food Truck,” it would appear pulling that off is harder than it seems.  Loloi is the proprietor of the vehicle in question and she’s getting by well enough until she meets up with Ash, who’s got superhuman strength and a bone to pick with the people who allegedly saved humanity a while back.  Ludo Lullabi does have an interesting idea or two, like having the main antagonist actually trying to make a better world while being eaten up by guilt over what he’s done, and line art that’s really expressive and bombastic.  Unfortunately, his efforts are dragged down by uninteresting characters and coloring from Adriano Lucas that doesn’t make the art pop as it should.

I’ve said before that it should’ve been called “Perry Cutter, Werewolf P.I.” and I still think so after reading through writer James Robinson and artist Jesus Merino’s Los Monstruos.  Perry is… you know, in a city where humans coexist with the famous monsters of myth and he’s been hired to find a vampire by a man who has never forgotten her.  This leads our protagonist into a tangled web of crime and corruption, as is usually the case with these kinds of stories.  While Robinson does the genre conventions and dialogue well and Merino gives it all its own distinct look, it never really feels like we’re getting more than a conventional post-WWII piece of crime fiction with monsters plugged into it.  It’s not bad for being that, but I’d certainly be up for reading a sequel that tried to do something different.

At the end of the previous volume, we learned why the entire cast of “Feral” had to be cats as its cannibalistic climax probably couldn’t have been done with humans.  We get to see the fallout from that revelation in Feral vol. 4:  Pet City as things go from bad, to worse, to better, then to SO MUCH WORSE as Elsie, Gigi, Lucky, and company find themselves having to deal with the Bad Kind as well as old and new management.  Ultimately it’s another solid volume even as it feels like things play out pretty much as you’d expect.  Up until the end, that is, as the status quo is blown up and for an injection of star power from the cast of the creators’ previous breakout series.

“Crave” was pretty entertaining.  “Violent Flowers” had promise that I don’t think is going to be delivered on.  Artificial, also from creator Maria Llovet, doesn’t have much to recommend it unless you’re looking for a cross between “Blade Runner” and “Fatal Attraction.”  Clara is a fashion stylist whose disappointment with her wet noodle of a boyfriend leads her to try an android dating service from Date-X.  I can’t ding this miniseries for being predictable – it was clear where it was going from the solicitations – but I can take issue with the fact that it’s ultimately pretty boring.  “Crave” was fun because it made the, “Well that escalated quickly,” aspect of its plotting into actual fun.  Things don’t escalate nearly as quickly or as far as they should here, even though Llovet’s art remains appreciably sexy.