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20th April 2024

United States

New Super-Man #1 (review)

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New Super-Man #1 (review)
DC Comics, September 2016
Writer: Gene Luen Yang

American publisher DC Comics are presently undertaking one of its periodic hedge-trimming exercises, where its character properties are revamped or reconstituted so as to remove complexity caused by years of convoluted plots. This time around the exercise is called “Rebirth”.

In this “Rebirth”-branded title, DC Comics have made the editorial decision to create a Chinese version of its premier property, Superman. This is achieved in the form of a new, Shanghainese character called Kong Kenan. Kong is not a typical altruistic hero. The characters is in fact a conceited bully who picks on Lixin, the overweight son of a media mogul, stealing his lunch and money. In a moment of bravado, as a supervillain called Blue Condor is about to kidnap Lixin, Kong throws a can at the Blue Condor’s head. Lixin is saved – but not from Kong, who continues to extort Lixin for cash. Kong’s moment of courage is captured in social media and he quickly becomes a minor TV celebrity.

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Champions #1 (review)

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Champions #1 (review)
Marvel Comics, October 5, 2016
Writer: Mark Waid

Champions #1 is a new comic book series from American comic book publisher Marvel Comics. The title has a history within Marvel Comics. But this comic does not have anything to do with the “Champions” team from 1975, which featured characters from the X-Men franchise, Ice-Man and Angel, along with other slightly obscure characters, Black Widow, Hercules, and Ghost Rider. Instead, it introduces a new team consisting of young (both in terms of story and publishing history) characters: the popular, Muslim teenager, Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan), a space-based character called Nova (Sam Alexander), an alternative universe Spider-Man (Miles Morales), the newly re-vamped Hulk (Amadeus Cho), and Viv (the “daughter” of a robot from the Avengers title, called the Vision).

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The Eight Most Iconic Guns in Comic Books

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Guns and comic books have a long-standing relationship, but the use of guns in comic books very much dependent upon the respective comic book sub-genre.

War-themed comic books published during World War Two and after featured characters which had, as a rule, no qualms about shooting dead opposing soldiers in often stylised, bloodless battle scenes. These sorts of exchanges of fire are most prevalent in the very long-running series, Commando: For Action and Adventure, a British war comic published by D.C. Thompson & Co since 1961 and approaching its 5000th issue. Soldiers die from gunshot in “Commando” stories, but gore is never depicted.

This absence of bloodshed in these comics is a sanitisation of war for a youthful audience. There is no torn flesh and bone by sniper rifle, no fly-infestation of shredded organs by machine gun. To a very significant extent this absence of gore glorifies war: it makes it harmless save for enemies dropping bloodlessly to the ground, and the hero’s occasional, barely-debilitating bullet wound in the shoulder (one of the few bullet wounds not likely to be fatal).

This has changed in more recent times, with comic books following the lead of online games such as “Gears of War”, but also by writers seeking greater realism as the audience has grown older and more sophisticated.

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Monster of the Week #1 (review)

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“Monster of the Week” #1 (review)
Self-Published, October 2016
Writer: Ryan Little

The Kickstarter blurb for this comic opens with the following elevator-pitch: “A Giant Monster Kaiju book in the wonky tone of Adventure Time.”

(“Kaiju”, as we have previously discussed, is a Japanese type of comic book dealing with enormous city-destroying creatures, in the manner of “Godzilla”.)

The overarching plot is amusing. Each year, once a week, every week for three months, a giant monster inexplicably appears from the sky, in the American Mid-West. The US Army generally disposes of these enormous beasts using rockets and tanks, but little seems to be known about them.

monster-of-the-week-2

Importantly, in a faux-competition with the US Army in the destruction of these kaiju are amateur monster hunters. We meet two examples of these:

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