Comic Book Herald

A Comic Book Reading Order Guide For Beginners & Fans

Sean Dillon

Screaming at No One (Lois Lane: Enemy of the State Review!)

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When reading Lois Lane, the question arises time and time again: Why is Greg Rucka writing a Lois Lane Maxi-Series in 2019? The meaning of that question changes as the series goes on. The first time the question is asked is before you begin reading it and you wonder why Greg Rucka is writing it. It’s not that Rucka is a bad author; He’s a bit too fond of the US Military for my tastes, I got tired of Lazurus after a couple of volumes, and “Candor” is quite bluntly the worst thing everyone involved ever wrote. But he’s written some stuff I’ve quite liked: Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia, “Severance Package,” and the Question/Montoya bits of 52 to name a few.

This is the first major series for the character of Lois Lane since 1974. Why is Greg Rucka and not, say, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Marguerite Bennett, or Magdalene Visaggio working on this title? It’s quite possible that Rucka really wanted to write a Lois Lane book and, after the kerfuffle surrounding his Wonder Woman: Earth One book, maybe this was a means of making it up to him. Yet, Lois Lane isn’t one of his traditional spy/criminal/soldier/cop protagonists. She’s a reporter who is often at odds with her militaristic family. Why would Rucka gravitate to such a character? [Read more…] about Screaming at No One (Lois Lane: Enemy of the State Review!)

An Interview With Esteemed Author Henry Henry

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Comic Book Herald scored an exclusive interview with renowned author Henry Henry, most recently depicted in the pages of Vault Comics’ Fearscape, about the upcoming follow-up work A Dark Interlude.

He sits across from the other side of the screen an ocean away. From what I had heard about the man, I was expecting a monster. Like one of those character actors who got type cast as the self-satisfied serial killer. Richard Brake in a Rob Zombie film or Lars Mikkelsen playing Rupert Murdoch for Steven Moffat. The kind of calculating man who would chew your ear off about the symbolic implications of a murder tableau while standing before your father’s corpse. The knife still embedded into his heart.

Instead, he’s twitchy. A sad, twitchy little man with a palpable sense of himself. He wants you to believe he’s so much smarter than he is, almost as much as he wants to believe it himself. He tries to hide it behind shadows. His cell is deliberately lit to make visibility more difficult like he’s the monster in a film noir. He sits cross legged with a slight smile on his face. [Read more…] about An Interview With Esteemed Author Henry Henry

Theses on Three Jokers by Geoff Johns & Jason Fabok

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Ed. Note: Spoilers for Three Jokers (and more or less the oeuvre of Geoff Johns) follow!

0. Let’s just get this out of the way: The Killing Joke is not that good of a comic. Even by the standards of bad Alan Moore comics, this sticks out in terms of its quality. Where most other trademark bad Alan Moore comics are bad for more interesting reasons (Neonomicon and later volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are bad for interesting yet horrifying reasons), The Killing Joke is perhaps Moore’s only major work that’s bad for the boring reasons most other comics are. It’s bad because it lacks ambition to be anything other than a story about Batman and the Joker. It’s bad because it treats Barbara Gordon more like a prop than a character. It’s bad because the environment it came out of was toxic to the point where Alan was explicitly told to “Cripple the b*#ch.”

In short, it’s bad in the same way comics like the Vigilante arc “Father’s Day,” the Violator miniseries, and Three Jokers are bad. [Read more…] about Theses on Three Jokers by Geoff Johns & Jason Fabok

Crossover #1 Advance Review!

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The problem with writing about Crossover #1 is that the most interesting aspect of the book occurs on its final page. It’s a combination of text and image that retroactively changes how the issue is read. The implications of the page would require thousands of words unpacking (among other things) why Mark Waid is editing this book, the rise of conservatism within superhero comics since 1986, the tendency to distort ideas into mere buzzwords, one of the many reasons why I no longer have any faith in humanity, a truly wretched and distasteful Tori Amos analogy about the difference between Donny Cates and Mark Millar, why the Captain Marvel cameo was recolored despite him being a public domain character, the acronym DSHKBAWKA, and the time no one noticed Superboy gruesomely (if accidentally) killing a cat.

And this would all make for a pretty damn good review if not for the ethics of explicitly talking about the final page in a review not only predating the comic being released, but also one provided by the publisher of said comic (Ed: Thanks, Image!). It can be implied, sketched around, but it cannot yet be stated. As such, the task at hand must be focused squarely on what is known to the public. What can be talked about. And, in fairness, there are things to talk about beyond that final page. [Read more…] about Crossover #1 Advance Review!