From the beginning, The Black Hood (Archie) has been a vigilante noir more than a straight superhero story. Greg Hettinger gets his powers and abilities from a crippling painkiller addiction and an inability to deal with his past, not radioactive spiders or alien DNA. And the book’s return, starting a second season this week, finds Greg lower than he’s ever been, with a comic at its best.
Duane Swierczynski, returning to the book with art by Greg Scott, picks up across the country from Philadelphia, in Santa Monica. Greg, haunted by his failures, has given up and is sleeping on the beach, homeless and scrounging for food. It’s not a dignified life, necessarily, but all Greg really wants is to be left alone with his demons. Unfortunately for him, his past, and his better nature, are catching up with him.
Swierczynski smartly puts the focus on Greg and why he’s a mess. The Black Hood, who is basically a maniac, can be difficult to relate to without that core of humanity, and by focusing on that, it emphasizes the best in this book. Now, of course, to see what he does next in his second season.
Hadrian’s Wall #2, Image
The space-set murder mystery from Kyle Higgins, Alec Siegel, and Rod Reis, unfolds with an excellent second issue. The first set up the premise, of a spacewalk going wrong and a pill-addicted detective, Simon Moore, who hates the victim’s guts assigned to rubber-stamp the ruling. Unfortunately for the conspirators, Simon cares about his job, and his investigation quickly finds that his former friend was murdered. What makes the book great is that the question of “Why?” is front and center, not just why the murder happened, but why Simon, who was shot by the victim, would care so much. Any comics fan with a murder mystery itch should pick up Hadrian’s Wall post-haste.
Weird Detective #5, Dark Horse
Fred Van Lente and Guiu Villanova wrap up their brilliant mix of noir and Lovecraft with the inevitable showdown between our hero, such as he is, and the monster supposedly behind the whole thing. But, in both crime story and weird fiction fashion, there are wheels within wheels and forces behind forces. Van Lente’s ability to draw parallels between detective fiction tropes and Lovecraftian horror has made the series’ five issues some of the freshest takes on Lovecraft we’ve seen in a long time, and Villanova’s ability to make the tentacled goopy monsters and detectives both feel new ties the whole thing together. If you haven’t been following, pick up the full set of comics; you’ll likely be hearing about this book for a while.
Cave Carson Has A Cybernetic Eye #1, DC Comics
Gerard Way and Michael Avon Oeming revive one of DC’s more obscure characters, one of the two-fisted adventurers of the ’50s and ’60s who’s spent years in backup features. But that’s good, in a way, because it gives the creators a blank slate, and they choose to focus on Cave and his family. Cave’s wife Eileen has died after a long illness, and he’s struggling to connect with his daughter Chloe. Oh, yeah, and also he has a cybernetic eye that he doesn’t remember having implanted that’s scanning everything and recording every moment of his life for an unknown purpose.
Way and Oeming, working not just with Carson but most of DC’s ’60s adventurer stable, strike a fairly amusing tone in places, as little fazes Carson. Exploring the Earth’s crust, hanging out with robots, all this is just a weekday for him. For Cave, his real struggles, the big scary intimidating stuff, are the personal things: Cave can fight alongside the Metal Men, but he can barely keep it together after the death of Eileen. It has the effect of foregrounding Cave’s humanity, and that makes this take on DC’s adventure comics much more than just a retread.
Faith #4, Valiant
Jody Houser and Pere Perez give their comedic heist at a comic convention a bittersweet ending that lingers on the nature of heroism. Faith has accidentally been magically duplicated, and much of the story is both a savvy riff on evil twin tropes and an amusing look at comic-cons. Still, the ending is something that will stick with readers for a while, and offers a glimpse into just what kind of hero Faith really is.
Astro City #40, DC Comics: Kurt Busiek’s fond reworking of comics’ past wraps up its latest arc with a witty take on magicians and lawyers, and how there’s little difference between the two.
Infamous Iron Man #1, Marvel : How, precisely, does Doctor Doom become Iron Man? That’s the question this series is tackling and it’s off to a slow, but interesting, start.
Rumble #15, Image Comics: John Arcudi and James Harren’s urban fantasy, with its story of ancient gods and working joes both just trying to get by amid the occasional insanity of a massive street brawl between immortals, just keeps getting funnier and richer with each issue. And this arc ends with a tragic moment the book has been building to since the beginning, no less.
Herobear And The Kid Fall Special, BOOM! Studios: Mike Kunkel’s endearing strip about a kid and a bear who’s also a superhero gets a fall special that’s a great read for all ages.
Mockingbird #8, Marvel: Marvel’s gleefully weird spy series wraps up with an issue that’s funny, but also dedicated to giving Bobbi Morse the feminist spin she deserves.
This Week’s Best Collections
The Fifth Beatle Expanded Edition, Dark Horse (Softcover, $15): The complicated story of Brian Epstein, the man who launched the Beatles and kept them together before his 1967 death, gets a much-deserved expansion, and is a must for music fans and anybody curious about the band.
Visual Abuse: Jim Blanchard Graphic Art 1982-2002, Fantagraphics (Hardcover, $35): The work of Blanchard, legendary for his punk rock posters, has been difficult to find in the past. Which is a shame, as Blanchard is one of the more talented artists out there. So Fantagraphics has done a service by getting as much as it can between two covers in a tasteful curation of some hilariously distasteful work.
Midnighter Vol. 2 : Hard, DC Comics (Softcover, $15): DC’s openly gay, hilariously violent anti-hero saw his ongoing wrap too soon, although thankfully he’s already come back with a six-issue miniseries. But you should get caught up with Steve Orlando and Aco’s quietly boundary-pushing book.
