Friday, 1 August 2014

Comic book review: King Conan Conqueror #6- A Kingdom of Dust



Writer: Timothy Truman
Artist: Tomas Giorello
Colours: Jose Villarrubia
Publisher: Dark Horse Comic
Released: 30th July 2014


‘But of what worth are power and the treasures it brings…if there’s no one to give them to?’

So says an elderly King Conan as he concludes his tale of the glory days of battle and how he re-gained his kingdom, and his Queen.

After the glorious battle, after the mighty sweep of his sword and vengeance gained, the defeat of his enemies and the destruction of the wizard Xaltotun, the book ends not with a celebration, but with a melancholy lamentation.

It’s that feeling of melancholy that I will remember the most from this latest take on Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon story. This final edition celebrates Conan’s victory with gloriously illustrated panels that depict the key moments of battle.

The standout panels are the destruction of the wizard himself, in a swash of blood and furious, aggressive muscular vengeance. It’s the colouring that does it here, but in the quieter panels there is a look in the eye of the elderly King Conan. Still mighty, still a towering colossus of coiled muscularity, but the eye, surrounded by scars, it is sad, very sad.

The good news is that this creative team is going to return. There are no details as of yet, but as soon as I hear about them I’ll put it up on my blog. I don’t usually announce comic book news here, but with this creative team working again on Conan; I’ll make a happy exception.

King Conan The Conqueror Part 6 of 6 is a book of blood, battle and glorious vengeance for our eponymous hero. It was a great victory, but now as an elderly King Conan re-tells the tale of his most glorious hour, there is no joy there, no celebration, no boastful elevation of his own legend. No, there is only sadness as he surveys the life he is now living, and how everybody he knew, admired, loved or hated are no longer of the world.

All that remains is a melancholy old King with a kingdom of material riches but with nobody to share them with. Worse still, he has no heir apparent to the Kingdom he spent his life’s energies and passions to secure, and as he looks over the body of his dead wife the past is all he has. The present is numb, and the future offers nothing but dust.


Rating: 10/10



Thursday, 31 July 2014

Comic book review: Sandman Overture #3: Reader meet author


Writer: Neil Gaiman
Artist: J.H. Williams III
Publisher: Vertigo (DC)
Released: 30th July 2014


It’s been a long wait, but we expected that, and now after reading the third instalment of The Sandman Overture I’m more certain than ever that what Neil Gaiman is doing here is working through his career as a writer, and the success that his most famous creation has given to him. 

I don’t know anything about Neil Gaiman’s life story, and I’ve only attempted to read one of his novels (it was boring and I stopped reading one third of the way through), so I’m not a fanboy. I enjoyed reading his Sandman comic books in the 1990’s, and I left it there, in the past. 

This new Sandman book has a nostalgic quality, and that’s why I’m reading it. It reminds me of some horrible times in my own life when I didn’t have much to look forward to apart from a good book.

Sandman was a good book, it opened a door to something better, something more interesting than my own lead weight life of predictable reality, routine and sleepwalking through crowds of horrifyingly indifferent people. 

I welcome its return, but everything has changed. Not just in my own life of course, but in the wider world as well. Read my other reviews, as that’s where I’ll detail the changes, this review is going to be simple, precise and short.

Sandman Overture #2 is heavy in text, and some of the background art looks wonderful. It has that mythical, mystical, intergalactic, otherworldly, spaced out quality that makes you think of larger, weightier concepts than everyday concerns on planet Earth. You can get lost in this world, and that’s exactly what the Sandman books used to do so very well when they were new, different and special.

The fanboys will appreciate that. They can pretend it’s still 1996. They do love to do that. I however read nothing in this script other than a writer talking about being a celebrity (a ‘star’) and how to deal with killing off the character that made him a star in the first place. Is it a subconscious thing? I think so. Gaiman is sitting down and writing his reality into the world of the Sandman. 

It’s not a bad book. It’s a book with a famous author revisiting the character that has allowed him to live a life as a celebrity writer. If you want to know how Neil Gaiman really feels about the character that made his name, then buy this book.  I can’t get anything else out of it.

I’m 100% positive that I would have loved this book if I read it back in 1996 as a bored and alienated young man. However, in 2014, and as the man that I am today, I read it, put it aside and think, man, life has really changed me. That’s all. 

Rating: 7/10

Wednesday, 30 July 2014

Comic book review: Evil Empire #3: The Hagman and Hagman Report of comic books



Writer: Max Bemis
Artist: Ransom Getty
Publisher: Boom Studios
Released: 30th July 2004 

Just when I thought it was getting predictable, with the fake liberal left, and the fake intolerant right lined up as the heroes and villains of the book, something happens at the end of this issue that has thrown my expectations into chaos, thus making this third issue of Evil Empire more than just another formulaic politically correct leftist leading comic book, and something that is trying to get in touch with the pulse of our times.

Corporate enforcers enjoying their time off with drink and drugs
This is a comic book unlike a lot of the others on the market today, in that it refuses to close the curtains, bathe in ignorance and pretend that we are all still living in the mid to late 1990's. This is a book that says something about the world, as it is today. It’s a book that is dealing with the present day anxieties that a lot of aware people are talking about. Evil Empire is the Hagman and Hagman Report of comic books.

I’m not going to spoil anything here, and I’m not going to detail the plot like many of those other boring and formulaic reviews you find on comic book web-sites. I'll briefly sketch some of the plot, but I'm going to spend most of this review talking about the bigger issues that the book is addressing.

This book is about the future of America, and how it has turned into a fascist totalitarian Police state ran by criminal elite’s and policed by drugged up psychopaths in corporate enforcer uniforms.

Yes, it’s the very near future, but like any good dystopic work of fiction, this is really talking about what is happening in America today.

So what is happening in the America of 2014?

America is a country where hard fought for freedoms are diminishing by the hour. A country taken over by private banks and corporations that own and control both mainstream political parties, and where democracy is a rigged game. A country where the media works against the people, lying to them, distracting them and telling them that black is white and up is down. A country where large numbers of people refuse to look at reality, simply because political correctness dictates that they cannot criticise a man of the president’s particular skin pigmentation. This is America as it is today, and yet the vast, vast majority of comic books just refuse to even go there, at all.

Here comes some justice
Evil Empire is unlike the vast majority of comic books that you will find in your comic book store today.

Before I talk about the actual content of the book I have to give credit to artist Jay Shaw for the fantastic cover that adorns Evil Empire #3. It really is exceptional. It is a cover that says everything about the state of America as it is today. A flag dripping down the plug hole, leaving a bloody stain around the rim. That is America, slowly fading away in a pool of blood. Blood from it’s foreign policy of supporting terrorists abroad, and blood from it’s using the fear of terrorism back home to erect a concentration camp around the sleeping distracted masses.

And as America slips away the vast majority of it’s citizens obsess over sports, celebrities, materialism and divide and conquer media ploys like racism, sexism and homophobia. It’s a liberal thing in 2014. Guilt tripping over their own thought processes the President literally laughs in their faces as he deliberately flushes America down the plug hole of history.

The book begins with some drunken corporate enforcers getting what they deserve. It’s a very good start. It then jumps straight into a thrilling narrative about a right wing politician going all Satanic whilst the feminist liberal left (as represented by a pierced and tatooed rock star with a funky haircut) do all they can to stop him. If that was all that was happening here then I’d congratulate it on the cover, applaud it for the corporate enforcers being shown as the control freak psychopaths that they are, and then just leave it as another feminist liberal book that thinks that political correctness and socialism is going to save the day, and stop America from going down the sink.

Not everything is as it seems here
But that is not the case. Something happens near the end of this book, something fantastic that really pushes this book over the edge, making it a country mile better than what you usually get in comic books that are dealing with socio-political issues.

This is not just an aware comic book though.  It’s an exciting, fast paced and unpredictable comic book as well. The pacing is spot on, and there is barely a wasted panel in the entire book. This book is tight. It doesn’t mess around.

Evil Empire really intrigues me now. Last month’s issue did a great job of sending me off in the wrong direction, but after the exhilarating events of issue #3 I’m back on this bandwagon big time.

This one could be very good. It’s a book unlike so many others, in that it appears to at least be attempting to interact with the reality of the world as it is today. How revolutionary eh? A book that hasn’t got its head stuck in the sand and it’s ass in the air. What a revelation. If you haven’t been following then follow. Get the first three issues; read them all in one sitting and you’ll have the same expression that I’m wearing on my face right now. A big old smile, surprised that a comic book of 2014 is actually reading like a comic book that was written in 2014.
Rating: 9/10

Tuesday, 29 July 2014

Death metal review: Sluggard, by Sluggard: Ten minute Aussie head snapping growl-fest


Listen to the album for free by clicking here- http://abysmalsounds.bandcamp.com/album/sluggard-2

Two words to describe this three-track album. Sludgy and thumping. The vocals are harsh, growled, but the lyrics are easy to decipher. From what I can gather they are direct accounts of what I presume to be early (and disastrous) missionary expeditions, probably to Australia, as this is where the music comes from. To my ears the vocal style is reminiscent of the aggressive, snapping, snarling growl that you get from a death metal band like Carcass. The sound has that toe-tapping quality as well where you bang your head, get pumped up and head off down the gym.

Brent, the talented man behind Sluggard

The album is just over ten minutes long, and I’ve included a link at the top of the review so you can listen to it for yourself. I liked it, so ordered a tape cassette. That cassette comes with a digital download and is about as expensive as buying a sandwich. To say it’s worth the paltry sum I spent on it is a gross understatement.

If you want a good ten minutes of clenching your teeth, snapping your head back and forth and tapping your toes, click on the link above and listen to the music for yourself. Then if you want to show your appreciation for some great new music buy yourself a hard, or digital copy. We have to support independent music. Do you really want to live in a world where the only music on offer is corporate swill that is pushed down our throats by the same multi-national corporations that are trying to enslave us all? I certainly don't, and that's why I support great new bands like Sluggard. Just give it a listen. It's great stuff. Fast, angry, and with a thumping passionate beat that gives it all a real sense of urgency that demands you pay attention.

Rating: 9/10

Friday, 25 July 2014

Comic book review: Winter World #2- A good old fashioned comic book


Writer: Chuck Dixon
Artist: Butch Guice
Publisher: IDW
Released: 23rd July 2014


I’m not going to write a lot of words about this book, because there’s not that much to say about it at the moment. Don’t worry, this isn’t yet another review where I say horrible things about a ‘feminist liberal’ comic book. I actually quite like this one, it’s just that as it’s only issue #2 and the story is quite simple at the moment I need to give it a bit more time, and wait until more things have happened before doing a lengthier review.

The art is going to change up a bit as they are getting new artists in, but at the moment it’s decent stuff with some nice snowy landscapes creating an icy atmosphere of cold uncertainty and dread. Tomas (King Conan) Giorello is going to illustrate the arc after this one, and as he’s my favourite artist working in comic books today you can guarantee that I’ll keep following this book just for that one reason alone.

 The story so far is easy to follow and uncomplicated. It’s about two people in a frozen apocalyptic future, fighting for survival. A bloke and a young girl with a pet badger called Rah-Rah. It’s cute and funny, but there’s danger there as well, with writer Chuck Dixon doing a great job of making me care about his characters whilst keeping the narrative on a constant knife-edge.

Issue #2 introduces what every good story needs, a creepy villain. We witness him doing creepy villain stuff, and I’m sure he’ll be causing trouble further down the road. The issue concludes on a good old-fashioned cliff-hanger, with our heroes surrounded by gun-toting locals. That’s good enough for me. Likeable protagonists, decent art (with the promise of even better to come), constant narrative tension, the introduction of a charismatic villain, and a perilous predicament for our heroes that will hopefully will be resolved next issue.

Winter World is a simple, good old-fashioned comic book. There’s a lack of liberal nonsense in it, and although it’s not exactly exposing the problems we have in the world today, it’s refreshingly free of the usual race/gender/sexuality (divide and conquer) politics, man/family-hating 70’s feminism and the unrelenting statist propaganda that you get in your big Marvel and DC comic book titles of 2014. It’s got a really good front cover this month as well. I always appreciate a good Scarecrow, and the scene depicted actually happens in the book itself.
Rating: 8/10

Thursday, 24 July 2014

Comic book review: The Superannuated Man #2- Working it’s magic on a subconscious level.


Writer: Ted McKeever
Artist: Ted McKeever
Publisher: Image comics
Released: 23rd July 2014


I’m not afraid to admit that the ending of this book left me feeling a little confused, and even after re-re-reading that ending a couple of times over I was still just as confused as before. However, something strange has happened to me whilst I’ve been putting this review together. Read on, and I’ll explain what I mean as I go along.

By looking at a small preview for next month’s book I can see that the confusing images of sperm that conclude this issue are going to lead into some kind of dissertation or perhaps even dissection of the theory of evolution. And as a man with an opinion or two on that subject matter, this certainly intrigues me enough to keep me onboard this excellent, if slightly, and perhaps only temporarily, confusing comic book.

The art, for those not yet familiar with Ted McKeever, is uniformly excellent, a bit grotesque and out there for sure, but you get the impression that the man takes great pride in his work, and it really shows in his inks. I love it, and I’m not usually the kind of guy that thinks something is ‘cool’ just because it looks kind of yucky. This is quality yucky. Yucky with style.

There were a couple of talking points that came to mind whilst I was reading this book. These are issues/concerns that resonate with myself on a personal and intellectual level, but that’s what you get here with my reviews.

The first of these issues was the way that meat was treated as meat. In this grotesque future world where animals are operating with the same level of consciousness as human beings they like to eat meat, just like a lot of us do, and some of that meat just so happens to be human meat. This makes a lot of sense to me, and this is coming from a vegan, a bloke who believes that we shouldn’t eat any meat at all.

If animals began acting as we do, why wouldn’t they eat human flesh? Why wouldn’t they have a butcher shop with a human carcass in the back- room? We eat animal flesh right now, and a lot of us think that this is normal behaviour. It’s morally wrong and we all know it deep down, but we hide it from ourselves, preferring to enjoy our pork chops and not even think about where they came from. If animals had evolved consciousness and became just like us, then surely eating human flesh would be quite natural for them, right? It’s wrong, but so is eating the flesh of animals, and that’s why I am a vegan.

The second issue this book got me to thinking about kind of ties into the first one really, in that it’s an issue about valuing conscious life. The Superannuated man is watching a movie, and this big blob floating head creature is ranting about mankind being a plague on Earth, and that procreation is evil. He’s an eugenicist basically, a talking head on the television set, telling us that human beings are bad. You know his type? Bill Gates, David Attenborough, all of those kindly old liberals who tell us that we should kill ourselves to save the planet. That’s how I see them, and that’s what I got from the floating head God creature in this book.

Perhaps I wasn’t as confused as I thought that I was. That’s why I do these reviews you know, to get the most out of these books, and if anybody bothers to read my thoughts, and I’m assuming that most of these reviews will never even be read, then that’s just a bonus. So I liked the book, it made me think about a few things, working on a subconscious level that has slowly been revealed as I’ve haphazardly put this review together. That’s quite clever really, isn’t it?
Rating: 8.5/10





Comic book review: Trees #3- Male guilt bullshit from the 1970’s


Writer: Warren Ellis
Artist: Jason Howard
Publisher: Image comics
Released: 23rd July 2014


Issue #1 of Trees was intriguing to me, as it appeared that writer Warren Ellis had the perfect allegory for the modern banking system, a toxic alien tree rooted in the middle of the city that periodically spat poison at the people. In other words the boom and bust cycle. Or, as it is in modern times, the austerity and bust cycle.

Issue #2 was slow, very slow, and I was starting to get worried that this book wouldn’t be quite as interesting as I thought it might be. There was nothing developed about the trees themselves, and the main protagonists were largely unlikeable.

Issue #3 develops the main protagonist, and as is usual in comic books of today she is a feminist liberal pretty young girl. A girl standing up for herself against evil men, you know the sort. The sort of girl that only exists in comic books because in the real world everything in the west is set-up to empower females. This would not be the case if the girl were living in a western backed Hell hole like Saudi Arabia, but no way is Warren Ellis going to touch anything to do with our corporate fascist ‘friends’ in Saudi.

Our heroine appears to be living in a future version of Italy, but as there are no details about the societal structure at all (it looks like now, but with big trees) it’s impossible to know anything else about where she is, or what kind of society she lives in. All I can do is compare it to my own world, as writer Warren Ellis hasn’t given me anything else to contextualise the half-world he is building.

Comic book writers like to pretend that Islam and countries like Saudi Arabia don’t exist, so their silly little feminist heroines end up being all aggressive and empowered in the very western cities that bend over backwards to accommodate their every whim. It’s ridiculous, purposefully ignoring reality as it is in 2014, but that’s what the liberals are all about. Ignoring reality and patting themselves on the back for their politically correct ‘bravery’ which of course in reality is not bravery at all, but the easiest sort of lazy conformity imaginable.

I don’t hate all liberals you know. They depress me more than anything else. The way they appear to be stuck in the 1970’s, unable to connect with the times as they are today and how they are being used by the elite’s, in terms of the mind control system that is political correctness and a childish obsession with race, gender and sexuality.

Tree’s #3 has a 1970’s feminist warrior doing it for the girls, stalking an elderly professor, moaning about her bad boyfriend, and then letting herself be used as a personal project for the elderly professor, but making sure it’s not about sex. Because sex is the only important thing, not whom the professor works for, what he represents or what his agenda is of course.

The girl in this book might as well be a Marvel super hero government spy/agent. You know the sort, a Black Widow, empowered because she is all tooled up and punching people in the face, but totally clueless about who she is working for (the state) and the slavery agenda that every modern state is all about. It’s stupid, it’s childish, it’s politically correct, it’s ignorant (it deliberately ignores reality) and the writer needs a kick up his feminist liberal backside.

Wake-up people. The year is 2014, not 1977. We should be more aware of what is going on in the world by now, and we need to leave this race, gender and sexuality nonsense behind. It’s a control system, where the liberals think they are changing the world because a female is now allowed to serve the control system as well as men. This is not equality; it is just the state further tightening its control system by bringing all groups into its orbit. Females are allowed to be Bishops in the Church of England now. Do you know why? Because it makes no difference to the elite’s that this is happening. The liberals think they have gained more freedom, when all they have done is sink further into the statist quicksand.

Writing a comic book about an empowered female in 2014 is bloody stupid unless the female is living in an Islamic country that is suppressing women’s rights. In Trees #3 our feminist heroine is walking around a western city in skinny jeans and a breast enhancing T-shirt, but when she talks she sounds like a 1970’s women’s-lib activist. That is ridiculous. I’ll say it again, put her in Saudi Arabia and we are talking.

In western countries of 2014 females are largely in charge. They are put on female only short-lists for employment opportunities. Laws are written to empower them, to take men out of their children’s lives and to have them reliant on the state. Abortion is endorsed by the state. Birth control is free, again endorsed by the state. The state wants females as corporate enforcers, and they will pat them on their heads and tell them good doggie whilst further tightening the corporate statist choke-chain around their necks. That’s how it works now, and I’m fed up with writers like Warren Ellis who are woefully out of step with the times.

Do you want to know where writer Warren Ellis is in terms of his understanding of the corporate statists control system that is being built up around us? Check out the words he’s put in his elderly professors mouth, words that say everything about his anachronistic world view, and how he still believes it’s a male/female power struggle that is the biggest problem of our times:

“Do you know why old men like young girls? It’s guilt. An existential horror at having crushed out female intelligence for our own amusement.”

He couldn’t be more wrong if he tried. What year is he living in? What country is he living in? Unless it’s at least way back in the 1970’s or he’s living in Saudi Arabia right now, this is nothing less than feminist liberal male guilt bullshit. I will no longer be having anything to do with this ridiculously dated and irrelevant comic book. How old is Warren Ellis? He must be in his late 80’s and housebound, right?
Rating: 2/10