What about the man who f#$%ed up this Rundown?

It’s now March and do you know what I realized?  I’m STILL reviewing comics that came out last year.  That’s still going to be true for a while yet because my “To Read” and “To Review” piles are both quite large at this point.  (Neither will be getting smaller or larger this week because I’m in the middle of re-reading “All-Rounder Meguru,” but that’s beside the point).  With this hanging over me, I figured now would be a good time to burn through a lot of the smaller, less consequential, titles in my review pile.  I don’t necessarily mean “less good,” just that I looked at these titles and felt that I could sum up their quality in a paragraph.

Starting with Moonshine vol. 4:  The Angel’s Share.  Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s “Werewolf Noir” series has created an entertaining surface for itself over the past couple of volumes.  That remains true here as protagonist Lou Pirlo finds himself down on his luck in Cleveland as Eliot Ness hunts the Torso Killer.  Is Pirlo the fictional perpetrator of this real-life case?  Could be.  Or it might be related to an old mobster friend he’s paling around with, or even Southern transplant Tempest as she claws her way up in the world.  There are some hints that Azzarello and Risso might be aiming to tell a story with more depth than “Lou Pirlo goes somewhere and people wind up dead, stylishly.”  Until they get there, what they’re offering is fine as it is.

Eric Powell’s saga of “Backwoods Conan” comes to a climax in Hillbilly vol. 3 as Rondel, his tomboy girl friend Esther, stone turner James, and Lucille the giant bear gear up to take on the coven of witches that has infested their land.  They’ve got some convincing to do, as there are some people who won’t take their word that there’s an army of witches and their familiars coming for them.  The setup and how it plays out may be familiar, but Powell gives his cast enough quirky character to make you root for them and his art remains as impressive as always in its sepia-toned glory.  Though this reads like a finale for this series, there’s one more volume out there that I’ll be making the effort to track down in due course.

Keanu Reeves may have liked Bang vol. 1 from Matt Kindt and Wilfredo Torres, but I’m not quite as enamored.  It’s basically Kindt doing his own riff on “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” only it involves James Bond (as played by Michael B. Jordan), John Maclane, a female Michael Knight, and Miss Marple teaming up to fight a massive criminal organization on behalf of the man who writes their books.  I’m not saying it’s a bad high concert, just that it feels like nothing more than that.  As if the idea of having this kind of team-up was enough to sustain it.  That’s not the case, though Torres does deliver some appreciably energetic art as he tries to sell what the writer is peddling.

The Seeds got some notice early on as it was coming from much-liked writer Ann Nocenti, and marked “Hawkeye” artist David Aja’s return to comics.  Its first issue came out in late 2018, its schedule spiraled off the rails in 2019, and then the creators decided to finish it as a graphic novel in 2020.  I’d like to say that all the suffering that last sentence implied was worth it.  The bad news is that this miniseries about a reporter trying to uncover some truth while she works for a tabloid in a slowly dying Earth that is currently being visited by aliens trying to harvest the planets last good bits is both depressing and depressed.  That’s not a good combination as the latter means the bad times this graphic novel brings are paired with an execution that borders on catatonic.  If you like your misery slow-burning, then maybe you’ll appreciate this more than I did.

It’s a crossover that feels at least 20 years past its sell-by date, but the world has finally been graced with Transformers vs. Terminator.  Now, I think that this comic’s (complete lack of) timeliness is part of its charm and as a Dark Horse/IDW co-production, I felt that there’d be a reasonable standard of quality attached to it.  And there was!  Legendary “Transformers” artist Alex Milne provides the art and the whole story looks quite sharp.  It also has the neat concept of a Terminator coming back in time to stop the Decepticons’ rise to power, only to come back too late and having to team up with the Autobots to fulfill his objective.  The problem is that’s really the only clever bit from the story by David Mariotte, John Barber, and Tom Waltz.  It goes through the standard Decepticon vs. Autobot motions, with a Terminator hanging around, after that.  The end result is as inoffensive as it is unoriginal.

The last time we left “Young Justice,” they had just been sent to parts unknown of the multiverse by the ruling powers of Gemworld.  So the subtitle of Young Justice vol. 2:  Lost in the Multiverse is perfectly apt in this case as the team finds themselves meeting up with the likes of Captan Carrot and the Zoo Crew, the “Kingdom Come” Superman and his comrades, and the evil version of their team in Earth-2.  They stay for a few issues there, before returning home and finding a different kind of trouble, and the end result somehow manages to not feel as chaotic as the first volume.  Maybe that means I’m used to the kind of storytelling that Bendis and artist John Timms (and Andre Lima Araujo and Nick Derington) are doing here.  Or it could be Stockholm Syndrome — it’s kind of hard to tell.

Beasts of Burden (vol. 1):  Animal Rites didn’t come out last year, but I did buy it in Amazon’s latest “Buy 2 Get 1 Free” graphic novel sale recently.  I’m glad I did as Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson’s series about a pack of dogs, and a cat, who deal with the supernatural happenings in the town of Burden Hill is a delight.  It’s fun to see these animals use their wits and slowly expanding knowledge of the occult to address issues like a haunted doghouse, the influx of witches into town, zombie pets, pagan rats, unquiet dead puppy spirits, and more.  Dorkin and Thompson do a great job making each animal distinct in voice and look, and they take these stories to some surprising and, on occasion, really dark places.  It may have taken me a while to get onboard with this series, but I’m glad I did.  Now comes the fun of catching up with it.

If you guessed that I liked The Man Who F#$%ed Up Time, because I borrowed most of its title for this column, then you’d be right.  Sean Bennett is a lab assistant at a research center that has cracked the secret of time travel.  There’s only one rule for it:  Don’t F#$% Up Time.  Sean thinks he has that rule covered until he gets a visit from his future self in a bar one evening.  How does that lead us to an authoritarian future run by the power-mad descendants of Abraham Lincoln with dinosaurs?  Writer John Layman certainly couldn’t tell you.  He was too busy concocting the story that serves as a pretty funny troll on every other time travel story ever written.  Which is to say that if you liked his work on “Chew,” as well as artist Karl Mostert’s work on “Unkillables,” then you’re going to have a good time with this.