PARADOX #1
Written by Chris Gage and Drawn by Luis Henrique Ribeiro
Published by Arcana Studio

LAW AND ORDER scribe Gage makes his comics debut with one of my favorite types of sci-fi stories: the parallel world mystery. In fact, I love the genre so much, I wrote one myself back in 1991. Detective Sean Nault lives on a world where magic is a dominant force; weapons fire spells, coroners get testimony from the dead by talking to their souls before they cross over, and Winston Churchill amassed so much magical power while he was in charge of Britain that he’s still alive at the age of 130. So when a body turns up dead with a strange metal projectile having been forced through the skull, Nault and his contemporaries are beyond confused. You see, in this reality, no one has ever seen a bullet…

PARADOX’ strengths and weaknesses revolve around the way it applies classic police procedural tropes to Gage’s magical reality. Shitty marriages, superiors who yell a lot, accusing someone in a position of authority of a crime and being castigated for it… they’re all here. That makes the story feel a little too familiar at many junctures. However, some of the ways Gage plays with it, such as having Nault pay a hooker to magically look like the wife who left him, work to perfection. It’s a mixed bag, to say the least.

Where PARADOX gets its traction is at the end of the issue, when Nault meets Churchill and gets a look at the larger picture surrounding their world. Winston himself is a treat, and while I had guessed what he was going to offer in the way of exposition, it still made me smile and have a decent feeling about the book. PARADOX isn’t executed as well as it could be, and the art is inconsistent, but I think the potential for the book to grow and gain strength and depth is there. I’m willing to wait it out.

SIBAM?

Hmm… considering the writer’s pedigree and the fact that Nault bears more than a simple resemblance to L&O: SVU star Christopher Meloni… yeah. In fact, PARADOX was originally written as a screenplay, so it isn’t a leap to see this comic as a “proof of concept” effort. There’s no question that this would be an expensive film to make; this is an F/X heavy story. But with the right names on the marquee, I have no doubt this could be a summer tentpole effort.

EL ARSENAL #3
Written by Salvador Vazquez Martinez and Drawn by Daniel Perez Sanchez
Published by Arcana Studio

This sci-fi action effort concludes in enormously unsatisfying fashion, much to my disappointment. Through the first two issues, ARSENAL showed flashes of pure adrenal joy, and the first two thirds of the finale pay off in exactly that manner. Well-executed fights in a whorehouse and across the rooftops of the small town where the characters met up ratchet up the pace to “blistering” and the book looks like exactly what you’d been hoping for. But once the two primary characters are together on the stage in the last couple of pages, the creative team absolutely commits a fumble on the goal line. Frankly, I was pissed. After having invested myself in the characters and the story, it felt like Martinez and Sanchez decided that they wanted to show how “hardcore” they were in their storytelling. Umm… no. To all creators listening: take a cue from ALIEN 3. When your audience has invested deeply in something, don’t burn that investment. Use it. Very unfortunate what happens here.

THE BAKERS: DO THESE TOYS BELONG SOMEHWERE?
Written and Drawn by Kyle Baker
Published by Kyle Baker Publishing

Baker collects the first couple of issues of THE BAKERS in a gorgeous, color hardcover, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Anyone who has read this column long enough knows that I think Kyle Baker is the best talent working in comics today, and the material in this book is just more proof of it. The short cartoons in this book are hilarious, heart-warming, and drenched in a subtle irony that makes his shake your head at Baker’s cleverness. My favorite piece is one that I made note of the first time it appeared, titled “Art.” In it, Baker’s young daughter shows her daddy that she, too, can draw, and when effusively praised by her father, she knows exactly what to do next: charge him for it. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in many ways in Baker’s world, and that’s what makes it such an interesting place to be. The whole package here is terrific, not just the cartoons, but also the book design as well. I’d love to see Baker go strictly to this format and bypass pamphlets altogether, because the work merits it.

THE NEARLY INFAMOUS ZANGO #1
Written and Drawn by Rob Osborne
Published by Absolute Tyrant

Zango is a second-string supervillain with a petulant daughter and a mad scientist for a primary underling. As if that weren’t enough working against him, he’s also extremely jealous of many of the other villains and dissatisfied with his station in evildom. So when the scientist, Deacon Dread, proposes that he can turn garden vegetables into an unstoppable army of doom, Zango lets his common sense fly out the window and decides that’s how he will conquer the world and knock the other villains out of the spotlight. As you can imagine, Zango isn’t necessarily too bright. Osborne’s previous efforts, 1000 STEPS TO WORLD DOMINATION and SUNSET CITY have been a bit more grounded and reality based, even when funny like STEPS, so this is a different move for him. The army of mutated vegetables is inspired stuff, and the results are side splitting. The one element that really doesn’t work, though, is the daughter, who serves no real purpose and provides no laughs. One other thing to note: like the book I review after this one, Osborne has joined one of the newer waves of self-publishing, printing through ComixPress, a print-on-demand service that allows creators to skip soliciting through Diamond and to sell direct to readers and stores. Books like ZANGO and SINNAMON may be the future of the market. It’ll be interesting to see how they do.

SINNAMON: GRRL VS WORLD #1
Written by Angelo Furlan and Drawn by M. Gerald Delaney
Published by Catfish Comics

SINNAMON apparently had a previous life in thirteen issues that were published in the mid to late 90s, and while the creative team states in their text page that the previous series doesn’t really matter in order to understand this new effort, they’re very wrong. Sinnamon may or may not be a superheroine with the alter ego of Cindy Canyon, and that appears to be the mystery at the center of the story. Unfortunately, we aren’t given enough to go on as to what is really real, or why we should care as readers. Cindy is presented as weak-minded, and that makes you tired of her, rather than caring about her story. She’s a willing victim, and that’s something I just couldn’t get behind. The art doesn’t really help, either; Delaney’s stuff tells the story, but blandly. Nothing jumps off the page or injects excitement into the proceedings. The one real bright spot is that veteran creator William Messner-Loebs drew and colored the cover; he’s had some high-profile financial troubles over the past couple of years, and he gets royalties on the sales for the issue. It’s a nice gesture, and a pretty decent cover to boot.

PROSE CORNER

When last we left Soledad O’Roark in THOSE WHO WALK IN DARKNESS, she had taken down a rogue telepath and was back on the beat. In Ridley’s world, superhumans are outlawed, thanks to a 9/11-style incident that destroyed San Francisco, and cops like Soledad are trained to take down the ones who remained in America, defying an executive order. Soledad is the best at what she does, but her life is horribly empty and emotionally vacant. And worse, she has spawned a number of hero-worshippers in the department, chief amongst those Eddi Aoki. She believes that Soledad is who she wants to be, not knowing how sad a person her mentor is. But when Soledad is injured and temporarily assigned to the department that develops intelligence about the location of metahumans in hiding, they will both be drawn into a case that will change their careers. Because there’s a serial killer on the loose, targeting the superhumans vigilante-style, and the only logical solution is that it must be a cop. FIRE is the equal of its predecessor, delivering great character moments as well as high-octane action, and it has the added bonus of one of the most jaw-dropping plot twists I’ve read in years. It took me a good twenty pages to realize that Ridley was serious about what he’d done, and I was blown away by it. I still can’t figure out why this series hasn’t made it to the big screen yet; it’s great entertainment. I hope Ridley returns to this world, and soon.

AND NOW, for someone completely different. I’m pleased to present the reviewing debut of Jaime Jones, a fine writer who will be joining the SIBAM team on occasion. She’ll be taking a look at some of the prose books that have backed up in the pile.

SOUL CAVALCADE
Written by Robert Dunn
Published by Coral Press
Reviewed by Jaime Jones

It's 1964, and Esme Hunter is a young woman who spent her childhood dreaming of being a singer. She finally has the chance to realize her dream when she gets an audition at Fleur-de-Lys records, but is devastated to discover that FDL can't accept anymore female artists. In a plan that seems part TWELFTH NIGHT and part I LOVE LUCY, Esme dresses up as a man and successfully auditions for the Cravattes, an all male group. Now, all the top FDL artists are heading out together on a concert tour, the Soul Cavalcade. Esme must conceal her identity from a motley group of musicians and singers all crammed together on a bus.

The success of Dunn's book lies in his ability to paint such a detailed and textured portrait of the world of 60's soul music. As he describes the tour bus, you can almost smell the stale cigarettes and feel the sagging vinyl seat beneath you. The book is the story of the tour (dates and locations are given at the beginning of each chapter), and the bus is an important character in that story, driving us along from one chapter to the next. As crowded and dirty as the bus is, it's easy to feel an affection for it by the end of the tour, just as many of the characters do. The author gives us a fascinating look at life on the road in 1964. The Cavalcaders go days without a bed or a shower, play in halls with tiny stages and no seats, and encounter racism in the South. Obviously, we can't hear the music these artists are performing and reading lyrics is a far cry from hearing a song. Nonetheless, I was impressed with Dunn's ability to capture the feeling of the music and of this period in music history. It's about the story behind the song and the person who is singing it.

The book isn't without its problems. The amount of time Esme is able to maintain her deception while in such close quarters starts to become a little difficult to believe. I also found a few of the characters' motivations to be somewhat unclear. I particularly found the behavior of Orlando Calabrese, the heartthrob solo singer, to be occasionally confusing. The author seems to hint early on at some hidden aspects to Orlando that might explain his behavior, but doesn't really pay it off. Even though the main plot of Esme posing as a man is somewhat silly, it's also genuinely funny at times and benefits greatly from being set in a fascinating and well-realized world.

See you in seven.

Review materials may be sent to: Marc Mason, P.O. Box 26732, Tempe, AZ 85285. You can also find me at Happy Nonsense and The Comics Waiting Room

E-MAIL THE AUTHOR | ARCHIVES