boyajian@akov68.DEC (JERRY BOYAJIAN) (02/22/86)
Reviewed this time around: ALTER EGO #1 THE LEGEND OF WONDER WOMAN #1 ARMOR AND THE SILVER STREAK #1 STRATA #1 ELECTRIC WARRIOR #1 TRUE LOVE #1-2 HAWKMOON: THE JEWEL IN THE SKULL #1 Ratings for the comics reviewed are as according to the Mad Armenian Scale, a shameless rip-off of the Moriarty Scale, stolen out from under the very nose of the Napoleon of Crime. Nyah-ah-ah!! "For a critic, it's better to have wrong standards than none at all." -- Elmer Allyn Craft ******************************************************************************** |=>A+< A veritable Classic. One of the best of All Time. Example: THE SPIRIT | |==>A< One of the best of the year. Ex: TEEN TITANS #38: "Who Is Donna Troy?" | |==>B< A very good issue, one of the best of the month. Example: CEREBUS | |==>C< A well done, entertaining issue. Satisfying. Example: JON SABLE | |==>D< Rather boring, or a few good spots mixed with more bad ones. Ex: ROM | |==>F< Boring AND stupid or childish. Example: MARVEL SUPERHEROES SECRET WARS | |==>Z< Actually offensive. Example: DAZZLER --- THE MOVIE GRAPHIC NOVEL #12 | ******************************************************************************** ALTER EGO #1 [First, mini-series, $1.25] C- This comic is Roy Thomas' tribute to some of the lesser-known Golden Age comic heroes from the more obscure comic companies. To be quite frank, I feel none of the nostalgia that Thomas feels towards these characters, and since nostalgia is really 90% of this comic, I'm afraid that it just doesn't do much for me. BUT... is *is* well-done, and has some nice touches (eg. the "cari- catureness" of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo), and I'll most likely stick with the comic to see where it goes. I must say, though, that I'm a tad disap- pointed with Ron Harris' art; it's not quite up to the level of his CRASH RYAN work. ARMOR AND THE SILVER STREAK #1 [Continuity, $2.00] Art: C- Story: F Let's face it-- Neal Adams may be a great artist, but as a writer... well, he makes a great artist. This comic is just plain bad. Not as bad as SKATEMAN, which he did for Pacific years back, but it gives MS. MYSTIC a run for its money. It's got everything --- alien invasions, brothers who are pitted against each other to the death (look, if Silver Streak isn't Armor's brother, I'll eat my hat!), three siblings with similar names! (Jacques, Jack, and Jackie), you name it. And speaking of Ms. Mystic, the back feature here is a spin-off from that comic, featuring a second-rate Elementals. The closing caption threatens that this feature will continue in the back of a revived MS. MYSTIC (be still my beating heart...) Seventy-five cents would be too much to pay for this comic, let alone two dollars. ELECTRIC WARRIOR #1 [DC, $1.50] D+ I'm afraid that I found this rather trite. Future setting; mega- city; a caste system with the technocrats on top, primitives on bottom, and nature-lovers off to the side; a robot "policeman" who gains a "soul"; etc., etc. Doug Moench can be tricky, though, and he may just take this in a completely unexpected direction, so I'm going to keep going with it for the nonce. HAWKMOON: THE JEWEL IN THE SKULL #1 [First, mini-series, $1.75] D+ Dorian Hawkmoon is one of the many incarnations of Moorcock's Eternal Champion (of which Elric is another). Unlike the Elric series, though, I was never as taken by the Hawkmoon series; it never seemed to have quite the style that Elric had, but rather more like standard heroic fantasy. Oddly enough, it's for this very reason that the Gerry Conway/ Rafael Kayanan team fits this adaptation of the first Hawkmoon novel. The Elric series had a very artistic style, and Roy Thomas, Craig Russell, Michael Gilbert, and George Freeman did a fine job of evoking the ambience of Moorcock's writing. Conway and Kayanan did a more pedestrian job with Hawkmoon, which suits the more pedestrian style of Moorcock's writing in the Hawkmoon series. But this is neither here nor there. In the hands of a better team, this comic could well have risen above its source. The adaptation is superficial (in fact, it skimps on the novel now and then, and even sequences some events a bit differently, not that that changes the outcome any). I suspect that the reason for this, as well as the fact that this adaptation will run only 4 issues, rather than the 6-7 of the Elric adaptations, is because First doesn't expect this series to sell as well as the Elric, since Hawkmoon isn't as well-known to the general audience as Elric is. The trouble with this idea is that by putting a second-rate team on the book, they may well have a self-fulfilling prophecy here. THE LEGEND OF WONDER WOMAN #1 [DC, mini-series, $.75] D While we're waiting for the new, improved, lemon-freshened Wonder Woman to appear, DC decides to give us one last look at the "old" Wonder Woman (much in the same way as they gave us one last look at the old Superman in SECRET ORIGINS #1, I suppose). What Kurt Busiek and Trina Robbins wanted to do was a story in the style of the original WW creators, Charles Moulton and H. G. Peter, and in that respect, they somewhat succeed in that --- the story reads pretty much just like a Golden Age WW story. Unfortunately, it's just as primitive and, well, silly, as the old stories. Those stories may have worked back in the 40's and 50's, but they just don't fly here and now (I mean, I feel nostalgic for the Weisinger-period Superman stuff, and can read that stuff today despite it's corniness purely out of nostalgia, but I wouldn't want to read new Weisinger-period-*style* stories). Robbins' art works better than the story, but I still find it quite stiff. Be warned, though, if you haven't looked at this comic yet, but are thinking of doing so: continuity is blown to Hell and back, but sort-of on purpose. There are elements of both the Earth-1 *and* the Earth-2 Wonder Woman in this version, and as the essay in the letters page attests, as far as all parties are concerned, this story is not necessarily about either the Earth-1 or Earth-2 WW, but simply about Wonder Woman, period, as if there was always only one version. STRATA #1 [Renegade, black-&-white, $2.00] D I'm afraid Deni Loubert's struck out again. We have here a Victorian-style-dressed (but obviously contemporary, going by his reference to the C.I.A.) man in London swept into an alternate world known as Strata, which is basicly a "flat Earth", and where resides various anthropomorphic animals in a medieval context. More than that I can't really tell you, as the comic is one confused mess. I'm afraid that Deni Loubert simply doesn't know how to edit and just lets the creators do what they will, to the great detriment of some of the comics she publishes. TRUE LOVE #1-2 [Eclipse, mini-series, $2.00] C Finally, there's something here I can review positively. It may surprise you --- it surprised *me* --- that I'm giving a favorable review to (or even reviewing in the first place) a romance comic. I've never had any particular prejudices against romance comics, but they never really interested me. I have a couplein my collection, but only because they contain work by certain artists whose work I enjoy. In that respect, these two comics may be worth getting anyways, as the covers are by Dave Stevens and Brent Anderson, respectively. The first is reletively mediocre for Stevens, but the Anderson I really like. At any rate, one of the things that didn't interest me about romance comics was their being oriented toward a pre-teen girl audience, and going by the few issues of DC's YOUNG LOVE that I have, they were pretty smarmy. Not so the stories in these two comics. Like Eclipse's "sister" series, SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, TRUE LOVE reprints stories from one of the lesser-known comics companies of the 50's. And contrary to what one might expect, the stories herein seem aimed toward an older audience. Rather than telling simple stories about a girl trying to get that cute boy in math class to ask her to the prom, these stories are about selfishness, betrayal, deception, and inner beauty versus outer, among other things. They reveal important aspects of the human condition, in the context of a love story, to be sure, but in such a way that the context seems only superficially a romantic one. These seem to be romace stories only in as much as they are closer to the romance genre than to any other. Art-wise, we have here the same group of artists that were in SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, not surprisingly since both series derive their material from Standard Comics. In general, the work here is better than that in SOTI, especially the Alex Toth stories. If you are interested in seeing what a romance comic *can* be if it tries, or simply want to try something different from the normal super- hero/fantasy fare*, I can recommend these issues. If you are adamantly against romance comics, then I'm sure that I won't convince you otherwise, so don't bother. [* Not that I'm *against* the normal superhero/fantasy fare, mind you, but I still appreciate something a little different.] --- jayembee (Jerry Boyajian, DEC, Acton-Nagog, MA) UUCP: {decvax|ihnp4|allegra|ucbvax|...} !decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-akov68!boyajian ARPA: boyajian%akov68.DEC@DECWRL.DEC.COM