Punks the Comic #1: Somebody has been watching old episodes of The Young Ones

Story: Joshua Hale Fialkov
Art: Kody Chamberlain & Rob Guillory
Publisher: Image comics
Released: 8th October 2014 


Half-way through reading this book I was getting flashbacks to old episodes of The Young Ones and going to the Cub Scouts on my bike with it’s stupid light dynamo that slowed it down to a crawl. There was something very 1980’s about this book, with it’s references to Morrissey and Glenn Danzig, so I did what we all do now and looked it up on the Internet expecting the book to be a re-make of some old student project in 1986. I got one half of the equation right. It was an old student type of deal, but it was produced in 2004.

2004????????

What the Hell????????

How did something like this get any attention whatsoever in 2004?

Oh yeah, it didn’t. I never noticed it in 2004, and I was a pretty big fan of just about everything comic book related during that time. What were the writers doing in 2004? Did they have a DVD box-set of old Young Ones episodes, a limited budget, and so decided to put a collage based comic book together with references that were completely out of date and had no relevance to the world around them?

It looks like it.

So what is this book about then? It’s about some characters based on 1980’s English student stereotypes living together in a house where they are very bored and are not very successful with the ladies. The characters are physically and emotionally abusive to each other, but in a wacky, comedy way. Crazy things like Gnomes are involved. The dialogue is all one-liners that are trying to be arch, ironic, knowing and clever. It doesn’t work, instead it reads like smart arse witticisms that come from the mind of a Google kid, annoying as f*** douche bag. The narrative involves one of the characters bringing a girl home. All of the other characters are shocked. Before this mess of a book ends we are given some word searches (I’m not joking) and a reprint of the original book from waaaaay back in ye olden days of 2004. That book is just as bad as the 2014 incarnation.

Oh, the characters have fists, dogs and old President’s for heads.

Does that make it original then?

What do you think?

I’ll tell you what I think. I think that ‘Punks the Comic’ is a painfully unfunny student magazine based on an anarchic BBC sit-com of the early 1980’s. That show, as I mentioned in the first paragraph, is called ‘The Young Ones.’ It was great when it first came out. I know, because I was a kid who grew up with it, and compared to all of the other staid and conservative po-faced crap of the time (Blue Peter anybody?) it was the most exciting thing that I had ever seen. But I was about twelve years old, and that was decades and decades ago. If they released the same show today it wouldn’t have anywhere near the same impact, because the socio-political themes, anxieties and concerns would be decades out of date. Plus the humour, that was considered risky and edgy at the time, would now look a bit tame, silly, childish and dated.

Just like this comic.

How the Hell is this supposed to be a post 9/11 book? It’s not. It’s a 1980’s book, it just so happens to have been written in 2004/2014 by a writer who cannot get in touch with what is going on in the world today.

Leave your house for five minutes and have a look at the world mate. Please. Read a book. Watch a documentary. Get on the Alex Jones infowars website http://www.infowars.com/  for a day of research. PLEASE DO SOMETHING. Get with the bloody times.

Goddamn it, Goddamn it, Goddamn it.

This book says everything you need to know about the comic book industry as it is today. Backwards looking, irrelevant, out of touch and completely stuck up it’s own arse.

Rating: 1/10 (for the cover)

Wytches #1: More torture porn for the mainstream zombies

Writer: Scott Snyder
Artist: Jock
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 8th October 2014



First off, I want to mention the good things about the book, because it does a lot of things very well.

The cover is great, creepy and atmospheric. The interior art is great as well, and equally creepy and atmospheric. The script is built up scene by scene like a television programme or horror movie, and it reads exactly like a screenplay pitched to a television producer.

The characters are more recognisably human than you'll find in a lot of contemporary comics today. You can believe they exist, even if it’s in a Stephen King kind of way. If you are a young comic book writer then this is a book that you’ll want to emulate. This is how you begin a story. This is how you do it properly. This is how the pros put a comic book together.

Okay, here comes the inevitable sentence that I’ve been building to.

I disliked the comic.

Why?

The story is unpleasant, and the language used by the characters is coarse and gross. This is one of those books that thinks ‘edgy’ material means a rape scene or some violent homophobia. It’s a book where a young boy smashes his mother in the face with a rock. It’s a book with graphic descriptions of sexual violence. It’s a book where a teenager feels guilt because her psychopathic bully got exactly what she deserved. It’s a book where her supposedly loving father fails to explain to her that if somebody is attacking you then you have the moral right to defend yourself, as violently as possible until the perpetuator is neutralised and no longer a threat to do you harm. If you don’t, then line up for a life of victimhood. Line up for the voting booth. Line up for the new Apple slave surveillance product. Line up for the abattoir.

I did not like this book.

It is a book for the paranoid suburban dwelling masses. It’s a book for the lame ass fanboy Sheeple (and the pejorative fits the cretins like a wetsuit on Michael Moore’s blubbery body) that enjoy mainstream serial killer dramas on the corporate whore mainstream globalist media.

Hey kid, do you enjoy Dexter and Game of Thrones? Do you particularly enjoy the violent rape and torture scenes? If so, then pick up this book.

YOU’LL LOVE IT.

Scott Snyder explains his motivations in a long essay at the close of the book. Wytches is based on his childhood imaginations where he would walk through the woods with his mate, thinking about evil witches. He went back there recently, saw an old car that he remembered from childhood, went home, wrote a story with perverts, psychopaths and special ‘Wytches’ in it, and called Jock to make it look cool.

Jock succeeded. It looks great. But the beating moral heart of the story is yucky. It’s mainstream sick, celebrating, glorifying and revelling in disgusting things that just make us all more suspicious and distrusting of each other.

It is not a very nice book.

And I don’t want to read it.

Yuck.

Yuck.

Yuck.

Rating: 6/10 (For the script construction and impressive art)

Black metal music review: Guthmers Hahl, by White Medal: Black metal call to action

TRACKLISTING:
1. Return of Pagan Yorkshire
2. Guthmers Hehl
3. Us Tiem Ut Bitter Folk
4. Ar Deeard Moor
5. Skratje's Gate
6. Afeeard Ut Setting Sun

Released: August 2013

I have some black metal albums in my collection that reek of disease and decay. Warped by the evils of the world they sound defeated, isolated and their screams are of torment, despair and gargling death. Guthmers Haul by White Noise is not one of those albums.

This is music with drive, passion, aggression and an iron willed determination to take the world by the scruff of the neck and shake the evils from it’s scrawny body as it cacks it’s pants in terrified realisation that we have something with life here, something that is not defeated, something with masculinity, testosterone, drive, strength and determination.

I don’t want to wallow in sickness. Give me something with will. Give me something that’s not going to go down without a HELL of a fight. Give me the angry snarls, the jagged and aggressive guitars, the whipping marching beat percussion, the euphoric rise of the chorus, the punch in the face determination to wake the people of England from their sleepwalk into new world order totalitarianism.

This is music to wake up the dead. Switch off your television mind control programming and inject some life into your veins. Guthmers Hahl gives England a much-needed kick in the nuts.  I love it, love it, love it.

Rating: 10/10

Click link below to listen/purchase a hard copy of the album:
 https://legion-blotan.bandcamp.com/album/guthmers-hahl

Book review: Black Terror White Soldiers: Islam, Fascism & the New Age

Author: David Livingstone
Publisher: Sabilillah Publications
Released: June 2013


There’s too much information presented in this book, and at over 600 pages in length it’s an interminable chore to slog through it all.

Simply put, there’s too much going on here, and there’s no narrative thread that ties everything together. The research carried out for this one book could easily be used to create 10,000 other books. The books created from this information would be far more valuable than their original source as they could look at their individual subject matters in a far more satisfying manner than the original.

Bin Laden the acknowledged CIA agent

A typical sentence in ‘Black Terror White Soldiers’ goes something like this:

‘Bob knew Arnold, who knew Fred, who knew Charlie, who worked for X who believed in Y, and Y is related to W and W discusses the idea of Tom and Tom is related to Tracey who was connected on her maternal side to Trevor who was influenced by the teachings of Bob.’

This sentence structure is extremely taxing to follow, and it makes the end point almost completely redundant as you forget what it was all about in the first place. This is probably the least reader friendly book that I’ve ever read. From page to page it goes on and on in this highly complicated, scatological manner, barely bothering to link one idea to the other or putting anything of a narrative or ideological branch around any of it.

This is not a story. It’s a list, and who wants to read a list that goes on for over 600 pages? I’ve climbed a bloody mountain here, and it kind of sucked the entire way up. Crap, I’m not even sure why I bothered climbing the mountain in the first place.

But now that I’ve done it, what did I make of it all? What did I learn?  In one sentence, I learnt the following:

Everybody is lying, and those not deliberately lying are foolish dupes, and there’s not much that you can do about it.

That’s all I could get out of the book. Everybody who is trying to spread some truth into the world are linked to some group or other that we shouldn’t trust, so even when people are trying to tell us the truth they are just useful idiots being manipulated by shadowy occulted groups.

Corporate fascism, all wrapped up in political correctness

I did enjoy the part of the book that covers the occult theology of the elite’s, as it ties into my growing realisation that western democracy is a fraud, and that we are being manipulated by a tiny group with ties to intelligence agencies and occult secret societies.

I also enjoyed the section of the book that exposed how the Salafi/Wahabi death cults originating from Saudi Arabia have been manufactured from the start to serve western imperial objectives. However, this informative material is contained within reams and reams of dense, almost unreadable text, so the enjoyablity factor I got from reading this book, as a whole, was very, very low.

Despite all of the valuable information that it undoubtedly contains, I cannot recommend this book. It might even put you off exploring some of the topics discussed as it is so coldly and humourlessly written it’s almost like it was put together by a team of researchers rather than one human individual. If you want to read about any of the subjects collected within the chapters of this book then I’d strongly suggest you get a book that focuses exclusively on that one subject.

‘Black Terror White Soldiers’ will give you lots of references, but it’s almost unreadable and comes to no definitive conclusions about anything, other than the already painfully obvious fact that most of the people with mainstream platforms are lying to you. It doesn’t even try to present the subject matter in an enjoyable, reader friendly narrative form and is an absolute slog to get through, from beginning to end.

Rating: 5/10 (For the research material that it contains) 

Alex + Ada #9: To leave the safety of the living room

Writers: Sarah Vaughn and Jonathan Luna
Artist: Jonathan Luna
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 1st October 2014


Government agents hate it when androids become sentient, break free from their programming and no longer passively accept the subservient role that have been assigned to them.

In issue #9 of Alex + Ada the sentient android Ada decides to leave her differing and unsure owner/boyfriend Alex. Alex has a decision to make. Will he break free from his own programming, or will he continue to live his easy life of box ticking conformity and passive cowardice?

The panel of Alex contemplating a highly symbolic apple reveals the answer to that question. He refuses an offer to get lunch with a programmed and fearful work colleague, deciding instead to eat his apple, signalling that he is about to symbolically break free from his programming, just like the sentient android Ada.

It’s about time Alex, it’s about time.

Who is the more asleep, the more programmed? A conforming, fear-based human, or a sentient awake and brave android?

That is the question that this issue of Alex + Ada poses. It has obvious parallels to this world of 2014 where large sections of western populations live fear based, programmed lives where fear will make them vote for corporate asshole #1 or corporate asshole #2.

Far too many people waste their lives away watching fear based news and fear based serial killer ‘programming’ on their HD widescreen televisions, safe in their four walled box prison whilst the real world goes on around them.

It’s a life of a coward. A life dominated by fear. A life as a programmed android.

Alex + Ada is a must buy book. In a comic book universe of statist androids, this is a book with eyes wide open and a desire to leave the safety of the living room.

Rating: 9/10

Sherlock Holmes vs. Harry Houdini #1

Writers: Anthony Del Col & Conor McCreery
Artist: Carlos Furuzono
Publisher: Dynamite Comics
Released: 1st October 2014


Sherlock Holmes and Harry Houdini have a lot in common. Yes, I know that one of them is fictional, but the two characters in a literary sense occupy a very similar landscape. When you visualise the two personalities you get Victorian era London, spiritualism, fake mediums, daring escapes and the unravelling of mysteries.

Sherlock Holmes didn’t have much time for the supernatural. He thought it all a load of old bunk, a trick designed to part the gullible with their money. Harry Houdini was a well known, outspoken critic of the spiritual fakers and charlatans of his time, publicly denouncing them as frauds. He never claimed to be supernatural, like a lot of stage magicians of his time. He kept his secrets, but he didn’t claim to escape his chains because of magical powers. He did physical tricks, and he did them very well, and with a lot of showmanship.

Therefore the teaming up of Sherlock Holmes and Harry Houdini seems completely logical, as their attitudes towards the supernatural are pretty much identical. The problem however, was how do you write a ‘versus’ story when the two characters would essentially agree with each other?

Writers Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery aren’t pulling a fast one here by having a versus title, and then doing the opposite in the book. I admire that honesty. The book opens with the two personalities engaging in a versus battle, with Holmes declaring that he can deduce how Houdini performs all of his famous escapes.

Houdini takes him up on the challenge, and this book follows the two larger than life personalities as they engage in a public battle of one-upmanship live on a London stage. The book closes with a third party taking the role of the villain of the piece, a villain that will force the two personalities to team up and explore the possibility that certain elements of the paranormal are dangerously real, and not just the smoke and mirrors con trick that they had both previously assumed it to be.

This book is a lot of fun, and that’s exactly what you want from a title with two huge personalities like Sherlock Holmes and Harry Houdini. Houdini is written as a sceptical, big headed guy with a more down to earth wife who helps him to stay grounded. Holmes is written as a sceptical, big headed guy with Doctor Watson helping him to stay grounded. The two personalities are almost identical, so when they meet there is a fantastic dynamic going on with them trying to best each other.

The dialogue flows very well and the two characters are portrayed both on, and off stage, giving the reader a satisfying contrast between their public and private personas. This simple script technique is very reader friendly, making you feel like you are getting the real inside story on two extremely interesting personalities.

The only problem I had with the book was that Holmes himself is pencilled as a square jawed, beefy American movie star type, rather than as the hawked nosed, rake thin scholar that I usually associate with the character. That’s a minor snipe though, as the art is perfectly fine, with some lovely usage of shading and shadow, and with a nice use of dark backgrounds to create a spooky atmosphere for the book.

Sherlock Holmes vs. Harry Houdini #1 is a very well written book with two fascinating characters coming together to create a special a piece of comic book magic. It’s very well paced, starting off with a public confrontation between Holmes and Houdini; it then further develops the two characters, before concluding with a dramatic scene involving the villain of the piece. You'll love this book. It really is a lot of fun. The title might seem a bit daft, but it’s a very entertaining, well-structured comic book about two personalities that have a lot more in common than I had previously realised.

Rating: 9/10

Comic book review: Act 1, Parts 1 & 2 of the Green Lantern ‘Godhead’ crossover arc.

Click link for preview of New Gods-Godhead #1:
http://www.comicbookresources.com:8080/?page=preview&id=23868

Click link for preview of Green Lantern #35
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=preview&id=23867
















Details of writers and artist involved are included in the previews from Comic book Resources above^^


I found these two books to be a very enjoyable introduction to the new crossover arc featuring all of the characters from the Green Lantern Universe.

New Gods #1

Act 1, Part 1 (in New Gods #1) introduces some characters called the New Gods. It gives their back-story, shows us where they came from, tells us what they are all about, and more importantly, it shows us what they want in the very near future.

What they want involves the Lanterns, and in Act 1, Part 2 (in Green Lantern #35) the Green Lantern himself sees what he’s up against. Hal Jordan is his usual cocky self, and after engaging in an ill-advised battle with the New Gods (it doesn’t go too well for him) he decides that he can’t deal with this new threat without calling for some special back up. This is already intriguing because the person he has to call for help his number one Frenemy, a man that is always guaranteed to stir things up a bit.

The New Gods are far more interesting than your average cartoon evil comic-book villains because they are big picture characters, not just petty criminals with grudges or psychopathic tendencies. What they do effects the whole universe, not just a small section of it like what happens on planet Earth. They have come into conflict with the Lanterns not because they have evil intentions, but because they envision a terrible evil taking over the universe.

The Green Lantern and his Corp buddies don’t know anything about this evil, at least so far, and that’s where the story ends after Part 2. I enjoyed both books very much. I love saying that. It’s so much more fun to like than to hate. This is going to be an epic space adventure story, and I’m definitely up for that.

Green Lantern #35

It’s already very interesting, and there’s no silly mainstream comic book nonsense where they have to pretend that a 2014 America isn’t turning into a banker/corporate autocracy/fascist police surveillance state. This adventure is set in space, so they can talk about big things, big issues that matter, concerns that are seeping into the collective consciousness.

What am I talking about? Here's a quick example of the power of the sci-fi genre:

Have a look back at the ‘Star Wars: Phantom Menace’ movie. Yeah, I know it was awful, but the plot of the movie was actually exposing how political leaders manufacture false flag terrorist events to further their long-term agendas of creating a totalitarian, authoritarian Imperial Empire. How do you get unpopular legislation passed? How do you pass legislation (think NDAA) that gives you more power whilst reducing the freedom of everybody else? Simple, you arrange for something to be blown up, and the people will actually beg you to become an evil Emperor and to construct a totalitarian Police state around them. Hitler did it by arranging for the German parliament building to be blown up. He blamed it on his enemies, passed emergency legislation, and well, we all know what happened next.

That’s the good thing about sci-fi, it can say a lot about the world that we are living in, but gets away with it because it’s set in ‘space.’ This sci-fi story is off to a very good start. I hope that it manages to say a few things about these scary times in which we are living in today, but we’ll see. Jump on board nice and early, this could be a good one.

*The arc continues next week in Green Lantern Corps #35.

Click the link below for a short video on the themes of false flag terrorism in the Star wars movies:
http://vimeo.com/41963839

Rating: New Gods #1- Godhead Act 1, Part 1: 8/10

Rating: Green Lantern #35- Godhead Act 1, Part 2: 8/10