New Comic Book Day: DOOM Your Meme

Valiant Comics

As you’ve no doubt heard, in the new FF movie, Doom is going to just be some Eastern European programmer, and not the horrifically vain scientific genius match for Reed. Apparently. Personally, I think it’s absolute genius. Fox gets to steal DC’s high concept for Superboy Prime in one movie, AND it gives them an opening to cash in on Internet jokes while they’re still hot. Keep an eye out in 2017 for Fantastic Four 2: I Am Very Glad to be Returning Home where the team faces off with a singing Kristoff Vernard; the Wizard, played by a serious looking but still fluffy cat; and Bentley, the clone of the Wizard who just looks dour all day.

This week in comics, Archer & Armstrong take a joke all the way back around the circle of life; a stealth X-Files story starts; Flatliners gets turned into a heist comic; the full DC Multiverse continues to leak back into the orrery; we find out how low Base can go and what Trigun would look like if Johnny Cash wrote a song about it; and we get a whole new Captain America.

Archer & Armstrong: The One Percent #1 (Valiant)
A book about the next generation of the ridiculous bad guys from Archer & Armstrong, the 1%, wasn’t really a tough sell for me. I mean, there was slight apprehension because while the concept of the IRL 1% being horrible supervillains is timeless, the specific reference is a little time-locked. But then again, they’re the Stonecutters adapted for a world with superheroes. I can’t imagine a better thing to base a series around. Then I saw the Piketty reference and the bitcoin joke inside, and I realized “this is a comic made especially for me.” I’m so excited for this.

You can pick up Archer & Armstrong: The One Percent #1 at your friendly local comic shop or online via Comixology.

BOOM! Studios

Deep State #1 (BOOM! Studios)
I can’t quite put my finger on why I liked it as much as I did, but I really enjoyed Deep State. Justin Jordan and Ariela Kristiana have made a very entertaining X-Files knock off, only that’s not quite the right description for it. It pulls some humor from subverting the reader’s expectations based on the not-quite-overt references. It might end up being all about the conspiracy theories in the long run, but for the time being it’s a fun little alien mystery book, and I dug it.

The colors, especially lighting effects, are great, but the art on the whole could stand to have tighter inks. Kristantina’s art is vaguely mangaish, but with loose, sketchy inks it looks less manga and more incomplete. The sketchiness occasionally detracts from the motion of what would otherwise be really nice pencils. Like I said, though, I’m glad I read this. So far, Deep State is more like if the first time Mulder said “I want to believe” on The X-Files, War of the Worlds broke out and Scully yelled “OK FINE BUT NOW WE GOTTA DEAL WITH THIS SHIT.”

You can pick up Deep State #1 at your friendly local comic shop or online via Comixology.

Dark Horse Comics

Resurrectionists #1 (Dark Horse Comics)
This new ongoing series from blog favorite Fred Van Lente, Maurizio Rosenzweig and Moreno Dinisio is a heist story about people who can remember all of their past lives. Our Van Lente love is well established, so his involvement alone was probably enough to get me to buy it. Then I took a look at some preview pages, and Rosenzweig and Dinisio’s art is amazingly similar to what Mateo Scalera is doing on Black Science, especially with the colors. This is a really nice comic to look at. Plus it’s Assassin’s Creed without all the stupid “your memory is locked in your DNA” horsepuckey, which was the second most annoying thing about that series (the most annoying thing being everything that happened in the last 45 minutes, cutscenes included, of 3. WHAT A MONSTROUS PIECE OF GARBAGE THAT GAME WAS). I’m absolutely in.

You can pick up Resurrectionists #1 at your friendly local comic shop or online via Comixology.

DC Comics

New 52 Futures End #28 (DC Comics)
So now we know where all this is leading.

DC announced last week that come April, the entire line is going on hiatus, and Futures End and Earth 2 World’s End will end, leading directly into a 9 issue, weekly series called Convergence. Brainiac, fresh off of the “Doomed” crossover, where he discovered the existence of a vaster multiverse than is implied by Multiversity, has apparently been hanging with the Time Trapper, a new villain named Telos, capturing cities from these exiting Multiverses (watch these videos, and when you’re done picking up the pieces of your blown mind, tell me I’m wrong and that the no-longer-extant universes weren’t pushed out of the orrery) and AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH GOD I’M GEEKING OUT.

I’m actually psyching myself into this book and into Futures End. Continuity porn is like catnip for me. But rather than subject you to more of my wild and insane theories about the DC multiverse, I’ll wait two weeks until after I’ve read Pax Americana and write them up as my “One That Got Away.” I’ve never been more excited about the prospect of 10,000 words on how Captain Atom, Kwyzz and the fusion of vampire Ultraman from the end of Final Crisis with presumably bevampired Superman from Red Rain are all musings on the different types of love.

You can pick up New 52 Futures End #28 at your friendly local comic shop or online via Comixology.

IDW

Black Dynamite #4 (IDW)
In my NYCC preview, I was still going back and forth between Rick & Morty or Black Dynamite being the best show Adult Swim’s put out since Harvey Birdman. Now that we’re 4 episodes into the new season of BD, I need to admit that I was wrong to question the subtle majesty of the show that gave us “Willy Wanker & the Chocolate F**ktory.” The new episodes have been amazing.

As for the comic, it’s been really effective at balancing the absurd with the smart, quick reference humor just like the show, but it suffers a little bit because the voice actors are so talented. The comic is sadly missing Bullhorn, Honey Bee and Cream Corn. It’s still hilarious and great to look at, though. Really, the only way the Black Dynamite brand could be better is if they did an episode proving me right, that Fiendish Dr. Wu magically replaced Mr. Wu from Deadwood and Black Dynamite traveled through time to team up with Al Swearengen to save the town from kung fu/heroin treachery. They can even call it “Peckerwood, South Dakota, or The Good, The Bad and The Honky.”

You can pick up Black Dynamite #4 at your friendly local comic shop or online via Comixology.

Image Comics

Drifter #1 (Image)
I was worried coming into this one that I had overhyped it for myself. Ivan Brandon’s Men of War was one of the DC reboot launch titles that I really liked, but never got off the ground. Nic Klein’s art on Captain America was exceptional. And the sci-fi hook was right up my alley.

It was very much a first issue, with not much explained, but a ton set up. The art was fantastic, and the hook is great – Trigun but actually a grizzly space western instead of a goofy action comedy about the necessity of violence. The first page also has the best poop joke I’ve ever seen in a comic. “Projectile breach in aft panel; methane overexposure; personal disaster imminent” is how I’m going to herald every BM for the next week or two.

You can pick up Drifter #1 at your friendly local comic shop or online via Comixology.

Marvel.com

All-New Captain America #1 (Marvel)
It’s too bad this is probably going to be undone in a year, because Captain America has been Remender’s second best company-owned work (Uncanny X-Force is one of the 5 best X-Men stories ever told). It’s a meandering way of saying that I’ve enjoyed Cap very much over the last couple of years, and seeing Sam accept the mantle is particularly nice after the push that he’s been getting lately – here, in the awesome Mighty Avengers (turning into Captain America and the Mighty Avengers this week), and in Captain America 2, where he was one of the highlights of the best Marvel Studios movie yet.

Can we ditch FalCap as his name, though? I mean, it’s a little disrespectful to have to qualify the dude. He’s Captain America. The fact that he’s not also Steve Rogers is fine, but it’s like Rule 63ing the character names of Rule 63ed cosplayers: it’s implied by the appearance. Also, FalCap sounds like a patriotic luckdragon.

You can pick up All-New Captain America #1 at your friendly local comic shop or online via Comixology.

ONE THAT GOT AWAY
Every week there are way too many comics for me to read and keep track of. So in every column, I’m going to take a look at a book that came out in the last few weeks, but that I only just had a chance to read.

Aces Weekly

This week, it’s Aces Weekly, a subscription anthology webcomic started and edited by David Lloyd of V for Vendetta fame. And as an anthology, it has all the strengths and weaknesses you’d expect. Some of the stories are fine, some are not very good, and some are absolutely terrific. They’re up to volume 13 now, and there are some truly outstanding stories running through the current issue. Mal Earl’s “Scars” and “By the Sword” from Russ Leach and Ant Jones are highlights of the current volume (and the previous volume, in the case of “Scars”). And “I Don’t Know” from Esteban Hernandez is the kind of ridiculous, batshit, off the wall story – two regular dudes sitting at an outdoor coffee shop discussing whether or not they should annihilate all mankind to protect Mother Earth, presented so parched-dryly that it has to be comedy – that you would only find in an anthology. Couple that with earlier work from Phil Hester, Mark Wheatley, John McCrea and Lloyd himself, and the promise of stories from Bill Sienkiewicz, Steve Bisette and Colleen Doran and sitting on an Aces Weekly subscription right now is looking like a pretty solid investment.

You can subscribe to Aces Weekly at their site.

That’s what I’m reading this week. What are you picking up?