Dave's Comicbook Capsules Et Cetera
Intermittent Picks and Pans of Comics and Related Media

Standard Disclaimers: Please set appropriate followups. Recommendation does
not factor in price. Not all books will have arrived in your area this month.
An archive can be found on my homepage, http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/Rants
Rained on outdoor graduation, but then we got a double rainbow.

Items of Note (strongly recommended or otherwise worthy): Justice Wing:
Plan, Prototype, Produce, Perfect; The Way of the Househusband vol 5.

In this installment: Justice Society World War II, Justice Wing: Plan,
Prototype, Produce, Perfect, Disreputable Persons, The Way of the
Househusband vol 5, Hawking, The Other History of the DC Universe #4 (of 6),
The Blue Flame #1, Maestro War and PAX #5 (of 5), The Trials of Ultraman #3
(of 5),Shang-Chi #1, DC Festival of Heroes. The Wrong Earth Night & Day #4
(of 6), Sacred Six #9, Vampirella #19, The Orville Digressions #1 (of 2),
Kaijumax Season 6 #1 (of 6), My Little Pony Friendship is Magic Annual 2021,
My Little Pony Friendship is Magic #97, My Little Pony/Transformers II #2 (of
4), Transformers Beast Wars #4, Transformers Escape #3 (of 6), Transformers
#29-30.

Current Wait List (books either Diamond didn't ship or my store failed
to order): Nothing this month.

"Other Media" Capsules:

Things that are comics-related but not necessarily comics (i.e.
comics-based movies like Iron Man or Hulk), or that aren't going to be
available via comic shops (like comic pack-ins with DVDs) will go in this
section when I have any to mention. They may not be as timely as comic
reviews, especially if I decide to review novels that take me a week or two
(or ten) to get around to.

Justice Society World War II: DC/WB - This is part of the new animated
continuity that started with Superman: Man of Tomorrow. Barry Allen happens
across a fight between Superman and Brainiac, and due to plot device finds
himself in the middle of WWII with a team he'd never heard of, the Justice
Society. Not only does he need to find a way home, during the trip he got a
cryptic message indicating that he had to do something before leaving, and
that sets up the plot. They do a fairly good job of slowly unveiling the big
plot twist, and there's even a little easter egg for LSH fans. The climax is
a bit of a dueling deus ex machina thing, but that's okay, as it's
practically a denounment to the real climax. The Kamandi short sort of ties
into the main plot, and is...okay. It feels like they were going for a sort
of Thundarr feeling or perhaps even the partially-animated Kirby Marvel
cartoons, but were unwilling to commit fully to the deliberately bad
animation or rough designs. Recommended. Price varies by store and format.

Digital Content:

Unless I find a really compelling reason to do so (such as a lack of
regular comics), I won't be turning this into a webcomic review column.
Rather, stuff in this section will generally be full books available for
reading online or for download, usually for pay.

I suppose both of these are technically Other Media in that they're
novels, but I got ebook versions and didn't have any other stuff for this
category this month.

Justice Wing: Plan, Prototype, Produce, Perfect: Superfluous Press -
Okay, so Eric A. Burns-White has been writing superhero fiction for decades,
starting with the Superguy universe on Usenet, and then building his Justice
Wing setting on his blog and later his Patreon. The Justice Wing setting is
largely and obviously a deliberate DC homage with what look like a few Marvel
homages here and there, but it's also very strongly a Superguy homage...but
you don't need to know that in order to follow what's going on. Importantly,
the main character of this novel is not a Superguy transplant in any
meaningful way, he's Oliver Queen. Sort of. As pointed out in the end
notes, one goal of the story was to create a sort of alternative to Longbow
Hunters, making an unpowered archer into a serious hero without also making
him a mass-murderer. Broadhead is that archer, complete with weird facial
hair (muttonchops in this case), an inherited fortune of questionable
origins, and the whole "a hero who is an asshole" personality. The story
jumps around in time, with the main framing being set on what looks to be the
last day of his career (and maybe his life), with various interjections about
his origins, his impact, and his eventual alienation of just about everyone.
As the guy who was always there even if he had no powers and did have an
annoying personality, Broadhead's life is the framework upon which the author
sketches out the eras of his world. Anyone who had been reading his online
work to date (all of which have either bought the book by now, I suspect) can
see where various stories fit onto this scaffold (like seeing the other side
of Leather's fight against Broadhead here), but again it's not necessary.
This is about a single man determined to get things right even though the
world is Wrong. There are dark and bright mirrors aplenty through the
flashbacks, from friends who have lost all hope but still fight, to enemies
who should have been allies, and most of all the protege he was determined to
protect from himself. Strongly recommended. $6.99 Kindle edition, $16.95
paperback.

Disreputable Persons: Signal Comics (that's what's on the cover, no
publisher is listed on the Amazon page) - The fourth book in the
"Signalverse" series that kicked off with Miracle Girl & Jack. A few
characters from the larger universe do show up or get mentioned, but this is
mostly about a separate cast. Specifically, a group of paroled
ex-supervillains (who were generally never that villainous) and the one
minor-league superhero who keeps her eye on them. It's your basic "not very
bad badguys stumble onto some serious villainy and have to stop it themselves
because the heroes don't believe them" story, plus a romantic subplot that
requires the protagonist be pretty oblivious. A decent read the fleshes out
Blake Michael Nelson's universe. Recommended. $2.99 Kindle, $9.99 print.

Trades:

Trade paperbacks, collections, graphic novels, pocket manga, whatever.
If it's bigger than a "floppy" it goes here.

The Way of the Househusband vol 5: Viz - After a slump last volume, the
quality is back up to par. A good variety of situations and characters,
playing up some of the humor in the non-mob cast once in a while helps keep
it from falling into a rut. Strongly recommended. $12.99/$17.99Cn/#9.99UK

Hawking: :01 First Second - Ottaviani bounces around publishers with
various projects, and like his Feynman project this one from :01 First Second
has the same "trade dress" and general style of having an autobiographical
voice even though it's not a straight adaptation of an autobiography. Oh,
there's plenty of primary source material, and Ottaviani worked with Hawking
on the script, but this is assembled from a bunch of sources, much like
Primates was. (The Naturalist, which I'll cover next month, is more of a
straightforwards adaptation of an existing autobiography.) I admit to having
a different perspective on this than most, since I actually studied general
relativity a bit in college and astrophysics in grad school...I might be the
only person who read this and at some point thought, "Oh, he's foreshadowing
the Kerr metric!" As such, I may not be the best person to determine if the
explanations are clear enough for a typical reader, but they seemed
reasonable. And as for the non-science stuff, it doesn't shy away from some
of Hawking's personal failings (although the narration tends to speak of them
almost at a distance..."Oh, and this relatively unimportant thing happened,
and the work continued with adjustments," sort of thing when talking about
divorces and remarriages). Recommended. $29.99/$34.50Cn (hardcover)

The Other History of the DC Universe #4 (of 6): DC - This one breaks
away from the 70s/80s stuff and focuses on Renee Montoya from 92 to 2007.
Given that most of what I know about her is the BTAS version and her scenes
in the 52 maxiseries, there's a lot of places where I'm not going to know if
Ridley's contradicting canon in the way he did with Katana. Note that
starting with 1992 implicitly includes her BTAS appearances as part of her
life story, if grafted into something like the main DCU. And as near as I
can tell (given how I avoided a lot of the Batovers starting in 2001), she
gives a fair summary of events, if necessarily biased. As happened in #1,
the narrative voice evolves along with the character, so it feels like she
was keeping a diary that got turned into the comic. While the "other" aspect
of #1-3 was mainly racial, Montoya's race only impacts things occasionally,
with her sexuality being the main source of alienation, the main thing she
had to hide in order to Pass. (She repeatedly emphasizes that being anything
but a cishet white guy was a Problem on the force, but as long as she kept
the sexuality thing hidden she could metaphorically mask up and be accepted.)
And, of course, because she took up the mantle of the Question, there's a
page or so tracking how he stopped being a Randroid. Recommended. $6.99