Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, Vol. 1, by Paul Levitz, Mike Grell, James Sherman et al. (DC) | review by Stephen Theaker

The Silver Age Superboy has already been visiting the Legion of Super-Heroes for a while by the time this book begins. It may have only been a year or two for him, but from the Legion’s point of view he’s been visiting since 2959 and now it’s 2978. It’s explained that anti-aging treatments in the thirtieth century extend lifespans and youthfulness, so the Legion still appear to be in their early twenties. Sensibly, Superboy undergoes super-hypnosis before returning to the twentieth century, to avoid interfering with the timeline, though this means, tragically, that he forgets Supergirl every time, and goes back to believing himself the last survivor of Krypton. Originally founded by Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad, the Legion of Super-Heroes has a lot of other members by this point, including Brainiac 5, Phantom Girl, Chameleon Boy, Dream Girl, Mon-El, Shadow Lass, Wildfire, Dawnstar, Princess Projectra, Timber Wolf and, my favourite, Matter-Eater Lad, though he doesn’t play a big role in this book. This volume runs from issue 234 to 240, but the Legion had joined the title of the comic much earlier, with issue 197, while writer Paul Levitz had come on board with issue 225; presumably this volume starts where it does because the previous issues were collected in volume 13 of the expensive Archives collections. It works fine: it helps that it begins with a story from DC Super Stars #17, telling the story of the Legion’s founding. Despite the promise of the sales description, the book does not include issue 238 (a reprint of earlier adventures), only its cover. It does however include the All-New Collectors’ Edition C-55, an extra-length issue featuring the marriage of Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad, in a future derailed by the Time Trapper, not that anyone believes Superboy when he tells them. An important story, it leads to them leaving the Legion, per the rules. It’s hard to review something that’s so precisely what I’m after in a comic that it dissolves my critical senses. It’s not the Legion at its peak, but it’s building up to it, and if the actual plots (e.g. four legionnaires are combined into one composite monster) are not always top notch, the characterisation and the groovy seventies costumes are getting there. Some great names contribute, as well as those on the cover, including Gerry Conway, Jim Starlin, Walt Simonson and Howard Chaykin. And masses of superheroes in space adventures: what could be better? I should say though that I bought it for £3 in a Comixology sale. If I had paid the current price of £25 for it on Comixology, or even worse the current Amazon prices of £32 for the Kindle edition and £45 for the hardback, I might have been significantly less happy with it. ****

Jimmy’s Bastards, Vol. 1: Trigger Warning, by Garth Ennis and Russ Braun (Aftershock) | review

Jimmy Regent is MI6’s number one man, if we can trust the word of the terrorist on this book’s first page. Regent is a deadly shot with Dan Dare eyebrows and a fine line in double entendres. As his new partner Nancy McEwan discovers, though, he’s not quite the git you might expect. He’s so exceptional with women that he can tell if they aren’t interested, so he’s not a sleaze, and he fights to defend a parliamentary democracy because he believes in the notion of social progress. McEwan wonders if it’s more that he gets to shoot whoever he likes, drive far too fast, and “have sex with beautiful morons”, but he says those are just the fringe benefits. However, although he may have treated women well while he was with them, he didn’t stay with them long, and the consequences of a lifetime of love affairs and one-night stands are going to catch up with him.

Aftershock is a new publisher to me, but the list of other titles at the back of the book includes creators like Paul Jenkins and Mark Waid, so hopefully they’ll be around for a while. This volume collects issues 1 to 5 of the ongoing title, and the story ends on a cliffhanger, which some readers may find disappointing in a short book that’s going for about fourteen pounds in the UK. The title is also a clue that this will not be for everyone, since the very idea of triggering is treated as a bit of a joke throughout, and similarly the phrase “safe space” seems to be used in an odd way, as if it’s been mixed up with “happy place” – e.g. Jimmy tells one enemy who is trying to set him off that he doesn’t “have a safe space”, but of course for someone like Jimmy Regent, a white, male killing machine, everywhere is a fairly safe space, even when bullets are flying!


Nevertheless, I enjoyed it very much. It’s rather like Archer, if Archer was British, intelligent, and not such a dinosaur. Or indeed like James Bond, if Bond had a much more colourful rogues’ gallery. It may not yet have reached the heights of The Boys or Sixpack and Dogwielder, but it definitely made me chuckle, and I’ll be reading it to the end. Stephen Theaker ****

Starstruck, by Elaine Lee and Michael Wm. Kaluta (IDW) | review by Stephen Theaker

Reviewing Starstruck is difficult, since I barely understood a word of what was going on. In that sense, as well as in the detailed art, lettering and beautiful colours, it reminded me of reading French graphic novels – in French. There are people, in space. A ruler, who has a son and daughter who fight. A girl becomes an Amazon and as part of her initiation must battle some half-naked trolls. A psychic little girl climbs into an aquarium exhibit to communicate with the psychic aquatic life forms on display, sending her talent into overdrive, and when she’s older is placed with a fraudulent society of nuns. There’s a lot more going on, and a lot to take in, and I failed at that. Any individual page of it is glorious, and as a whole it’s admirable if baffling. Text pages at the end reveal that it’s all a prequel to a stage play, which helped me to understand it a little better: if I’d read it with a better idea of which characters were the protagonists, and what I was supposed to be rooting for, I would probably have enjoyed it more. And in a print edition, I might have realised sooner from flicking through that there was an extensive glossary; that would have helped too. New readers might be better off starting two hundred and thirty-eight pages in, with the stories of young Brucilla in the Galactic Girl Guides, since they are easier to follow and provide a more straightforward introduction to this universe. Overall, I enjoyed it, I think, but I started reading it in November 2013, and finished it in November 2017, which tells its own story. I would only recommend it if it sounds like something you’d really dig, if you like spending lots on time on each page of a comic, and plan to read it in print or on a tablet with a big screen. Having said that, its fans must have been delighted to have the whole saga collected in one book. ***

Atomic Robo and the Ring of Fire, by Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener (Tesladyne) | review by Stephen Theaker

The tenth volume in the Atomic Robo series is back in the present day, or at least 2015, with the robot hero out of action and his buddies scattered. His adventures in the Wild West (see Atomic Robo and the Knights of the Golden Circle) left him out of power, without a body, and time-travelling the long way round, while the Tesladyne Organisation has been turned into Task Force ULTRA, a nefarious governmental agency. In this book ULTRA decides that the fight against the giant Japanese monsters known as biomegas is too important to be left to Science Team Super Five, while escapees from Tesladyne’s Venezuelan branch try to revive Atomic Robo before it is too late. As the biggest biomegas to date attack, people are going to have to learn to work together, and Atomic Robo will have to go into space.

In an afterword the writer describes this book as a cross between the Jason Bourne films and Pacific Rim, which seems fair; an alternative comparison might be Hellboy meets Neon Genesis Evangelion. Unusually for a long-running comic, Atomic Robo has featured the same writer and artist since the beginning, and it makes for a consistent and reliably entertaining series. The art always looks good, looking not unlike a series of animation cels, and if it’s not always immediately obvious what’s going on, that’s because (again, like Hellboy) the art here needs to be read, not just the words. I first started reading this title because it was one of the few books of interest on the ComiXology iPad app in its early days, and even though Marvel, Dark Horse and DC have since joined the party it continues to hold its ground. A good book, well worth reading. ***

Attack on Titan, Vol. 1, by Hajime Isayama (Kodansha) | review

For the last hundred years, the world’s last surviving humans (so far as anyone knows) have lived safely in towns protected by a series of concentric walls, built so long ago that a religion has declared them the work of their god. The walls are tall enough to keep out the giants that have devoured the rest of humanity, but smaller towns are used to focus the titans’ attacks in predictable locations. Only the Survey Corps venture outside, in hope of finding a way to reclaim the world from the titans.

Eren Yeager (who will later develop a dramatically interesting skill), Mikasa Ackerman (who will become an awesome fighter) and Armin Arlert (whose strength lies in his brains) are three children, very close pals, who live in Shinganshina, one of the districts used as titan bait. And they are there when a new type of titan takes that bait: a colossal, intelligent titan who can see over the wall and kicks a hole open for its smaller friends to pile through. This leads to trauma for the three friends, and sets them on a path to the Survey Corps.

Slightly disappointingly, this long-running manga series is not set on Titan, so far as we can tell — Attack on the Titans might have been a more descriptive title. It seems to be set in Europe, going by the names of the children’s future colleagues in the Survey Corps (Jean, Annie, Bertolt, Marco, Reiner, etc), while Mikasa is the only living human of Asian appearance, making this a Japanese property Hollywood could adapt without getting into trouble for whitewashing. Although in theory this is a review of the first book, I’d read the first five volumes before writing it, and by the time this review is published there’s every chance I’ll have read all twenty-two volumes from the Humble Bundle. It’s extremely compelling, and a very quick read. I want to know what happens, where the titans came from, and what was in the secret basement of Eren’s mysterious father?

From page to page it wasn’t always clear to me what was happening, but that may be just because the visual grammar of manga is still pretty new to me, and I didn’t understand what kind of sounds the sound effects were supposed to represent – e.g. whether they were alarms, or a howling from the titans. Frequent recaps, information pages, and character introductions at the start of each book soon caught me up.

What makes the books so uncanny is that the naked titans have such gormless faces, a genius touch which makes it all the more frightening when they chomp on human beings. They are genuinely weird and disruptive. They don’t even digest us, they just seem to do it for fun! Rather like The Walking Dead, the series makes the oppressive sense of danger and frequent deaths of favourite characters bearable by frequently providing the cathartic slaughter of many enemies. Stephen Theaker ****

I Hate Fairyland, Vol. 1: Madly Ever After, by Skottie Young (Image Comics) | review by Stephen Theaker

Imagine if Dorothy was totally rubbish at quests, got stuck in Oz for twenty-seven years, and it drove her around the bend. That’s what happened to Gertrude, much to the dismay and misfortune of everyone in Fairyland. This book collects the first five issues of the series. When Gertrude first arrived as a six-year-old girl, good queen Cloudia told her that there was a door back to her world, and she just needed to find the key, “a quest that should only take two shakes of a bogglezig”. The girl sets off with greenfly guide Larrigon Wentsworth III and a map of all the known lands, but never finds her way out. Years later, after Gertrude blows out the brains of the moon and shoots down the stars, the queen has had enough, and starts looking for a way to be rid of the troublesome brat. The rules don’t allow her to harm any guest of Fairyland, but there’s nothing to stop her hiring someone else to do it. This is a fun, raucous, ultraviolent spoof of books like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Whereas Catherynne Valente’s similarly inspired (in both senses) The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making tried to reinvent the genre for modern girls, this comic overinflates it till it bursts, leaving bloody entrails everywhere. On Comixology it is rated 17+, but presumably that’s for the over the top ridiculous cartoon violence (the moon getting its brains blasted out, the girl eating mushroom people, that kind of thing), and I think it would appeal much more to younger teenagers. It’s bright, quick-paced, and appealingly grotesque, and I certainly enjoyed it. ****

Valerian: Shingouzlooz Inc., by Wilfrid Lupano and Mathieu Lauffray (Europe Comics) | review by Stephen Theaker

The Valerian and Laureline series of albums, created by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, lasted for twenty-two volumes, but many have only recently been released in English. The Dargaud French editions I collected include both of them in the title, but like the recent film, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (based closely on L’Ambassadeur des Ombres), this volume reverts to just the dude, which is misleading when hot-tempered, ultra-capable, politically-engaged Laureline is clearly the star of the show. The original creators having wrapped up their story, they have now allowed others to take a spin in the Astroship XB982. The artwork is a little different, but still good, and it’s recognisably the same characters and the same universe. There is a lot going on: the Shingouz, little aliens with a nose for information, are being pursued by an old friend of Valerian’s. Valerian and Laureline are trying to catch a class 1 android, Mr Zi-Pone, parts of whose brain are being used as tax havens, and the android is trying to catch a quantum migration tuna from Vahamine that it can sell for two thousand times Valerian’s salary. Laureline is as spunky as ever, Valerian as much of a dork. It’s a fun and frisky adventure. And for me at least, reading these in English turns out to be much easier than reading them in French. ***

The Metabaron, Episode 1: The Techno-Admiral, by Alexandro Jodorowsky, Jerry Frissen and Valentin Secher (Humanoids) | review by Stephen Theaker

The first of eight volumes, with a story by original Incal writer Jodorowsky, written by Jerry Frissen, translated by Quinn and Katia Donoghue, and then given a polish by Hardware director Richard Stanley. A lot of writers involved but they don’t spoil the metabroth. The first four pages suggest that events won’t go terribly well for our hero, before the book shows us how it all began. The Metabaron, coolest character in the first Incal saga, has pledged to kill no more, and for months has stayed in his quarters. He doesn’t eat, sleep, drink or presumably go to the toilet. But eventually his spaceship, the metabunker, requires a replenishment of its fuel, epyphite, currently being mined by slaves on the Metabaron’s home planet of Marmola. This will it seems bring the Metabaron into conflict with the resurgent Techno-Techno Empire, its Technopope and Techno-Vatican, and its greatest Techno-Admiral, Wilhelm-100, whose giant robot arms, also powered by epyphite, can cut a man in half with a single blow. The overuse of techno as a prefix in this album becomes rather comical, but the story is played seriously, and although sexual assault is for once in a Humanoids book kept offstage the horrors inflicted on the losers in the techno-tussles are still extremely unpleasant. The villains are truly despicable, and one is left hoping that the Metabaron will abandon his vow sooner rather than later. As ever with Humanoids books, the artwork is stunning: detailed, full-colour and expressive. The volume is available on its own digitally, or together with volume two (The Anti-Baron) in an oversized deluxe hardback. ***

Manfried the Man, by Caitlin Major and Kelly Bastow (Quirk Books) | review by Stephen Theaker

In a world where human-sized cats keep cat-sized men as pets, Steve the cat is struggling a bit. His home is a mess, he isn’t happy at his call centre job, his relationships with female felines are not purring at all, and his little man Manfried is lovable, but lazy, and doesn’t get on well with other little men. One day Steve leaves his window open and Manfried gets out. Steve’s life totally collapses, though maybe it’s necessary, since that’ll give him the chance to rebuild a better version. The relationship between Steve and Manfried is sweet, and Manfried is very cute, although the chubby little bearded fellow looks quite a lot like this reviewer so I would think that. Unlike him, I wear clothes, at least most of the day, and he looks very comical running around with his gentlemanly parts dangling around. There are no female pets in this book, and no reason is provided in the story; perhaps that’s being saved for the sequel, planned for 2019, or maybe it’s just that it would feel like a different kind of book with lots of naked women running around. The book defamiliarises our relationships with pets: it makes the reader consider just how similar our behaviour in that situation might be to theirs, how odd it is that people keep pets at all, and how much those animals mean to people, especially people who don’t have others to care for them. The cartooning is very cute, but never fails to provoke sympathy for Steve’s distress as his life goes terribly wrong, or little Manfried’s when he gets into a fix outside the house. ****

Cosmonauts of the Future, by Lewis Trondheim and Manu Larcenet (Europe Comics) | review by Stephen Theaker

First of a three-album series, this album was originally published in French in 2000 on Dargaud’s Poisson Pilot label. This English translation followed in 2016. It’s about two awkward children who struggle to get on with their peers or their parents. The girl, Martina, thinks everyone is a robot, and has a habit of twisting the skin on people’s hands to see if they will pretend to scream to seem human. The boy, Gildas, a new arrival at school, thinks everyone is an alien, and he tells Martina that he is a a “highly-trained cosmonaut”. They have a begrudging go at being friends, stop talking when the other children make fun of their relationship, but eventually team up to investigate the world and discover which of them is right. This is a really sweet portrayal of a childhood friendship, with witty and perceptive dialogue, and cartoonish but effective and emotive art. Children will enjoy it very much, although parents should be warned that it shows the children lying to their parents and going secretly on a train ride to another town, and what’s more taking a little sister with them on this jaunt, not something one would want to encourage. There’s also a scene where the boy punches a little girl at school without any consequences, which might be enough to keep this out of primary school libraries. Happily, an extremely jarring event later in the book turns out to be less serious than it seems at first, and this takes the book in a new and interesting direction that places it more solidly in TQF territory. Recommended for adults as well as children. ****

Soulfire: Omnibus 1, by Michael Turner, J.T. Krul, Marcus To and chums (Aspen Comics) | review by Stephen Theaker

Mal is a teenage boy in the year 2211 who is, as he will find out, a chosen one, the bearer of a spirit that has moved through many lives in preparation for its ultimate destiny. A flying woman with black speech balloons comes to kill him, while another winged woman, Grace, comes to rescue him, and while a giant robot dragon attacks his home city Grace whisks him away, to meet mystics who can train him to use his powers, and then to other allies in their fight against the evil Rainier and his soldiers. He’s a bad guy who survived the end of the last age of magic by embracing technology, and now that magic is on the rise again he is ready to combine the two to ensure his dominance. Luckily Mal has a pair of excellent friends in Sonia and PJ, who have got his back in all this and are willing to follow him way out of their depth.

This is not the kind of comic I usually read, but I can rarely resist a five hundred page omnibus or a comics Humble Bundle and this combined both. It turned out to be a pleasant surprise, very much in the vein of the Final Fantasy games. It shares some contributors with Top Cow’s The Darkness, and there are plenty of pin-up pages of beautiful women, but it’s not as sleazy or grotesque as I found The Darkness to be (see TQF41 for the review). It would actually be fairly suitable for a young teen. The publisher Aspen is planning to add age ratings to their comics, which has provoked some dismay, but it’s possible that, rather that warning children off mature content, their goal is to alert school librarians and parents to the fact that they are publishing books that are suitable for children and that children would like.

It’s a simple story told quite well. The experienced Jeph Loeb writes the earlier issues, with J.T. Krul then taking over. Michael Turner draws most of Volume One (the first ten issues collected here), and gets a story credit on them, while Marcus To, whose appealing style suits the story a bit better, takes over on pencils for Volume Two (the next nine issues). It’s light, frothy nonsense, and I wouldn’t recommend it to our more serious readers, but it was a nice way to spend a few hours. It’s colourful and pretty: many scenes take place by the ocean, and the blues of the seas and the sky and the exotic locales give it something of a holiday feel. Like Laura Allred’s work on Madman, Beth Sotelo’s colours and effects in Volume Two are so good that they become a reason to read the comic in their own right. I loved Grace’s shimmering Star Trek teleporter hair. ***

Conan Omnibus, Vol. 1: Birth of the Legend, by Kurt Busiek and chums (Dark Horse) | review

Conan is a burly, quick, strong and sharp fellow who wields a broadsword and wears a horned hat. He is a great thief, a great warrior, and eventually a leader of armies and a great king. He never gets the hang of magic, though, and over the years plays a pretty big part in ending its dominion over humanity. But that lies ahead. An unobtrusive framing device – a wazir reading tales of Conan to his prince in the distant future – takes us back to Conan’s birth, on the battlefield, after his pregnant mother Fialla rushes to help his father Conaldar. He is a month premature, but is still a very big baby. He already has a mean stare. To some extent, he is already the man he will grow up to be, even as a child. Rather than seeing him formed as he grows up, we see him revealed, through interactions with other children, adults, wild animals. He is as keen to learn as he is to fight. After bringing war upon his people, he leaves home, and then we see his first travels, with the traditional enemies of his people, and then being enslaved by the Hyperboreans.

This 456pp book collects issues 0 to 15, 23, 32, 45 and 46 of the monthly Conan series from Dark Horse. You can’t tell, however, which issue you are reading; a contents page would have been nice, or for issues to be separated by their original covers, or for artists to be credited for particular issues, but this format is standard for Dark Horse’s omnibus series, and probably appeals to people who just want the story without the apparatus. The artwork, by Greg Ruth for the early years, by Cary Nord and Thomas Yeates for the Hyperborean story, who are joined by Tom Mandrake for the third set of tales, is consistently magnificent. I’ve read that its distinctive visual style was produced by Dave Stewart and Greg Ruth applying the colour directly over pencils.


The book’s cover, by another artist altogether, undersells it, and led me to expect a glossier retread of the Marvel comics, but it’s meaty, smart, visceral and stylish. This is Conan at his best, not the lunkhead seen on the cover. He feels like a character, not just a fantasy. But it is a fantasy, of course, and there’s plenty of bedding beautiful women, none of whom seem to worry about getting pregnant. The lettering is worth a shout too, by Richard Starkings and Comicraft. There’s quite a lot of narration, and if that had appeared in a pseudo-handwritten font or (as in early issues of Savage Sword of Conan) something hard-to-read like thin white text on black backgrounds, it would have quickly become a chore. Instead, after the prologue, a typewriter font is used, as if the captions were torn from the manuscripts of Robert E. Howard. It’s easy to read and evocative of the pulps.


Dark Horse’s licence to publish Conan comics ends this year – if the rest is as good as this, they can look back on a job very well done. So frequently their licensed products don’t just live up to the source material, they outshine it. Much as I have loved what I’ve read of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword Sword of Conan, this is the best adaptation of Conan I’ve read. Volumes two to five are already available, with six and seven to follow later this year. Stephen Theaker ****

The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Great Darkness Saga, by Paul Levitz, Keith Giffen, Larry Mahlstedt and chums (DC) | review by Stephen Theaker

This four-hundred page Kindle edition collects issues 284 to 296 (and the first annual) of the series that had previously been Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, from 1982 and 1983. This includes the introduction of the team’s first brown-skinned human member (a new Invisible Kid) during an attack by Computo, and “The Great Darkness Saga”, a lengthy story whose long-teased surprise villain is rather given away by his appearance on the front cover of this book. This is what I think of as the real Legion. Reading these stories again, all these years later, fully restored, colour reconstructed, in the right order, with no missing issues, was little short of joyous. The stories stand up. Saturn Girl, Light Lass and Shrinking Violet can be a bit drippy in these issues, but to be fair the boys cry a lot too, and they are all going through a rough time. It has a huge, imaginative and entertainingly fractious cast of heroes, a universe full of danger and adventure, and a knack for switching from jokes to deadly seriousness as the stories require. A lot of the comics I read last year were perfectly decent, but this was a startling reminder of what it was like to read a comic I had truly loved for decades. *****

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Merry Christmas! Hope you enjoy your presents as much as I enjoyed this! – SWT

Groo: Fray of the Gods, by Sergio Aragones, Mark Evanier, Tom Luth and Stan Sakai (Dark Horse) | review by Stephen Theaker

Groo is one of my favourite comics characters of all time, his idiotically violent behaviour a reliable source of chuckles since the day I first read an issue. He’s better than Asterix, if you ask me, and the stories are better, and that he’s not quite as famous can only be down to him being published on the whole in single issues in the USA rather than albums in France. The previous series, Groo: Friends and Foes, was the comic at its very peak, fabulously coloured and brilliantly drawn (not to mention wittily scribed), with some of the detailed double-page spreads being absolutely stunning. It set the bar very high for this follow-up, which tells the story of an upstart god trying to take his place among the pantheon, and was originally announced as being twelve issues long, but by the time of release was down to four instead, with a new series to come soon. There’s no mention of the change in the issues themselves, but it does feel like the story reaches a natural conclusion. It shows us something of how religion works in Groo’s world (and ours too, for that matter) as the power of the gods waxes and wanes in proportion to how many believers they have. Groo causes the usual chaos, and there are plenty of chuckles to be chucked, and if it didn’t quite hit the glorious heights of the previous run it’s still one of the funniest things I read all year. ****

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This review originally appeared in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #59, which also included stories by Rafe McGregor, Michael Wyndham Thomas, Jessy Randall, Charles Wilkinson, David Penn, Elaine Graham-Leigh and Chris Roper.

Adventure Time: Marceline Gone Adrift, by Meredith Gran and Carey Pietsch (Boom! Studios) | review by Stephen Theaker

Following the successful tour recounted in a previous title, Marceline the musical vampire has lost her mojo. She’s spent too long eating nachos with Finn the human and Jake the dog, and that’s not enough to inspire her. While bemoaning this state of affairs she and Finn get walloped with a burst of electricity. When Marceline apparently goes on a rampage as a result, Princess Bubblegum feels she is forced to shoot her off into space. The result is that both are left heartbroken, Finn goes feral, Cinnamon Bun declares himself king, Suspencer tries to cash in on Marceline’s apparent demise, and Jake keeps eating nachos. Adventure Time has been one of the best shows on television for the last few years, and its art style translates perfectly to comics. As does its ever-changing moods, this story displaying all the whimsy, ebullience and melancholy fans of the show have come to expect, while focusing on the loving but fractious relationship between Marceline and Princess Bubblegum that has produced some of the finest television episodes. And it’s clever and beautiful and funny. Ordered into battle by Princess Bubblegum, the leader of the banana guards declares, “All right dudes. Can’t be ripe forever.” ****

Bloodshot: Reborn, Deluxe Edition 1, by Jeff Lemire, Mico Suayan, Butch Guice, et al. (Valiant) | review by Stephen Theaker

“Who was Bloodshot?” asks the first page of this comic. “Red Eyes. White skin. Guns… Lots of guns.” He was a vicious, psychopathic killer manipulated by false memory implants, working for the government, presumably in previous Bloodshot comics, but that’s all over now. At some point before this book begins he gave up his powers (regeneration, strength, aiming – basically Wolverine plus the Punisher) with the help of a woman he loved called Kay. That restored his humanity, but Kay didn’t survive, and now, six months later, he’s trying to keep calm and stay under the radar while working at a motel. Unfortunately, the nanites that provided his abilities are now taking over other people, civilians who aren’t equipped to handle them, and they are going on murderous rampages. His conscience gives him no option but to travel across the country recovering them, because at least he would be able to keep the nanites under control, but will it mean giving up his humanity once again? It’s the archetypal story of the superhero who wanted to give up the powers that were ruining his life, but can’t escape his sense of responsibility once they are gone. After that adventure is over, there’s then there’s an Old Man Loganish story set in a Mad Maxish future, where he teams up with other surviving Valiant heroes, which will probably be a treat for fans of those characters. Overall, I thought the book was a good read without being outstanding. It’s as well-written as Trillium by the same writer, and there are plenty of ideas, it’s just that it’s about a character who doesn’t massively appeal to me, and probably isn’t intended to. ***

Superf*ckers Forever, by James Kochalka and chums (IDW) | review by Stephen Theaker

A five-issue miniseries of the utmost puerility, this is very entertaining. The Superf*ckers are a Legion of Super-Heroes-esque gang of teenagers who live inside a club house and act like complete idiots. Even Vortex, who fixes up the universe every time the others destroy it, is willing to lie down on a sofa that has just been peed on by his colleagues Jack Krak the Motherfucker and Ultra Richard (it’s better than weeing in the toilet, they decide, because you never have to clean it). The skull possessed by interdimensional super-villain Omnizod shows up, first getting turned into a lamp by stinky Grotessa, then encouraging Princess Sunshine down a megalomaniacal path. Orange Lightning is jonesing for his next fix of Grotus’s slime, Computer Fist is struggling to get his robot fists working properly, and team leader Superdan returns from Dimension Zero just in time to lead a pointless new mission into Dimension Zero. The stories are sweary, rude and gross, and all the better for it. Kochalka’s artwork is as brilliantly characterful as ever, while a series of backups by other creators show that these heroes look just as silly through their eyes. The entire series can be read in under an hour, but what a great way to spend an hour. ****

The Complete Scarlet Traces, Volume One, by Ian Edgington and Disraeli (Rebellion) | review by Stephen Theaker

Before the films, before the games, before Richard Burton and the brilliant album, and even before the book by H.G. Wells, my first version of The War of the Worlds was a comic strip. It was introduced by Tom Baker’s head in Doctor Who Weekly, though my guess is that it was a reprint from Marvel’s Classics Illustrated. It made a real impact, and yet this adaptation (and then sequel) was even better. I’m sure all of our readers know the story already, but anyway… The astronomer Ogilvy spots great flumes spouting from Mars, just as it is at its closest point to Earth. A great cylinder falls on Horsell Common, then unscrews, and from it emerge first the Martians themselves, and then their weapons, to incinerate humans with as little thought as we would give to swiping at ants on a picnic blanket. It’s crucial for an adaptation of this story to get the horror of these scenes right, and here they are terrifying, Disraeli’s artwork capturing brilliantly the fear on the faces of all those people realising that they no longer rule the world, they no longer even rule Horsell Common. This is pretty much a perfect adaptation to comics of the novel, in my opinion. After that the book moves on to a sequel, ten years later, by the same writer and artist. Again, this is well-trodden territory, though it hasn’t always been trod with great distinction. There were books such as The Nyctalope on Mars (reviewed back in TQF31) and The Space Machine by Christopher Priest (described as dull by its own author), an awful television series, and the overwritten Marvel adventures of Killraven, born in the Martian pens. More recently, Stephen Baxter has written a sequel novel of his own, The Massacre of Mankind. The approach in Crimson Traces is to use new characters in a murder mystery story set in a Britain that has been greatly changed by the war between the worlds, the technology that was left behind by the Martian attack having been cracked open and repurposed to keep the empire running in tip-top shape. While delivering an action-packed thriller, the story also considers the results of automation without social equality. It’s a problem that is likely to only get worse for us, and there’s a warning here about how bad it could get. The sequel reminded me a bit of Bryan Talbot’s equally excellent Grandville series, as it puts some tough, likable characters up against a mystery of national importance and a bunch of vicious villains. Definitely worth your time, even if you think you’ve probably had enough of the Martians and their tripods by now. ****

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This review originally appeared in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #59, which also included stories by Rafe McGregor, Michael Wyndham Thomas, Jessy Randall, Charles Wilkinson, David Penn, Elaine Graham-Leigh and Chris Roper.

X-Men: Legacy by Simon Spurrier, Tan Eng Huat and chums (Marvel) | review by Stephen Theaker

This twenty-four issue series, which ran from 2012 to 2014 and is available in its entirety to subscribers on Marvel Unlimited, as well as in four collections, tells the story of David Haller, the son of Professor Charles Xavier and an Israeli diplomat. He is known to the world at large as Legion, and though he isn’t keen on that name (he’d be really annoyed that it’s the title of the new television show based on the comic), it accurately reflects his powers: like Crazy Jane of the Doom Patrol, he has many split personalities, each of them with its own powers.

When he’s in control, he can use those powers. When they’re in control, the results can be disastrous. This series begins at the point in Avengers vs X-Men when something terrible happens to Professor Xavier at the hands of one of his friends, and that totally shatters David’s control, as well as giving rise to a malignant and powerful new personality that resembles his father. Over the course of the comic David will try to re-establish control of his own mind, take a pre-emptive approach to mutant hate crimes, start astral dating Blindfold of the X-Men, and try to prevent an apocalyptic prophecy of his future from coming true.

It’s interesting to see Marvel trying something like this. It is a bit like the original Vertigo comics – Shade the Changing Man, say – both in tone, and style, and in that a lot of the stories stem from David’s own problems in keeping his powers in check; if he’s not the big bad in each story, there’s always the danger that he might be. The television programme will probably need to be less all about him, but it worked well for the comic. ***

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This review originally appeared in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #59, which also included stories by Rafe McGregor, Michael Wyndham Thomas, Jessy Randall, Charles Wilkinson, David Penn, Elaine Graham-Leigh and Chris Roper.

Princess Jellyfish 01, by Akiko Higashimura (Kodansha) | review by Stephen Theaker

This 388pp manga collects episodes one to twelve in the story of an unhappily single Japanese woman, Tsukimi, and the geeky friends with whom she lives, and how her life changes completely when she meets a very glamorous young man. It’s rather like The Big Bang Theory in reverse. She calls herself a fujoshi, which means (rather nastily) rotten woman – a woman who follows her enthusiasms rather than trying to fulfil her expected role as a mother or wife. There’s no magical or fantastical element in this book, it turned out; it’s called Princess Jellyfish because she is a jellyfish geek (a phase the author talks about going through herself in the biographical comments). That’s what gets her talking to her gorgeous new friend: he brings his stylishness to bear in helping her save a dying jellyfish in a pet shop, just as later he will try to save Tsukimi and her friends from losing their home to property development. He’s the first boy she’s talked to since elementary school, and what gets her over that barrier at first is that she doesn’t realise he’s a boy: he likes to dress as a girl. It’s a sweet and romantic comic, with an adorable lead character and likeable love interests, and it’s an eye-opening portrayal of gender fluidity in Japanese culture. The backgrounds are sketchy, but the character artwork is highly expressive . Unfortunately, at the publisher’s choice, this Comixology edition can only be viewed a full page at a time (described as “Manga Fixed Format”). Not a problem on a tablet, but you’d struggle to read it on your phone. ***