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Review: Heartbreak Quadrant: Phase One by Barrett Stanley

June 4, 2016 by krisis

There are three kinds of comic book Kickstarters.

One is from seasoned pros who want to do their own project – perhaps with a set of new intellectual property. A second is from indie creators who have published some work – perhaps digital only – and want to head to print to widen their potential audience. A third is from an unknown – maybe an artist in another medium, or maybe someone publishing their first work.

I’ve pledged to all three kinds of Kickstarters and I’ve seen all three fail. Yet, the first two have a leg up on the third in existing support and goodwill of their audience. You’re not likely to get angry at your favorite creator for telling you their project will be a month late or ten pages shorter than planned.

heartbreak-quadrant-phase-one-cover The artists in that third category have no leeway, not an inch of slack. To convert you from one-time speculator to long-term supporter they have this single chance to win you over – to impress you on every level.

I’ve pledged to all three kinds of Kickstarters and I’ve seen all three succeed. Yet, the third are the ones that most often stun me.

Heartbreak Quadrant: Phase One

Story and art by Barrett Stanley. Buy Heartbreak Quadrant for $15 at the Red Grapefruit online store.

#140char review: Loved the penstrokes & handcrafted colors of Heartbreak Quadrant: 2 women space scavengers in a vivid sci-fi world full of personal touches.

CK Says: Consider it.

Heartbreak Quadrant is a vivid slice of sci-fi crammed with big ideas but primarily about people.

Ida and Kumi captain their own peculiar spaceship resembling a massive red grapefruit through a post-Earth universe full of genetically tampered-with people who covet the simplicity of artifacts of their old planet. Ida is practical, canny, and loyal. Kumi is impulsive, optimistic, and can be dangerous. As they recover from a job that was tougher than they anticipated (“a little trouble with a candy amplifier”), an old contact reaches out with a hard-to-fill request for the most-coveted artifact of all – a baseline human, or “blank.” [Read more…] about Review: Heartbreak Quadrant: Phase One by Barrett Stanley

Review: Amazing Spider-Man, Vol. 4 – Graveyard Shift, by Slott, Gage, & Ramos

June 3, 2016 by krisis

Marvel Comics prides itself on the fact that its stories matter and always will – no major reset or reboots to maintain a set status quo.

If there’s one Marvel hero that doesn’t quite apply to it would seem to be Spider-Man. There’s a feeling among both fans and creators that Peter Parker works the best when he’s a young underdog whose life is full of mistakes and missed changes. Spider-Man is no fun as a perfect guy with a great life that’s protected by thick plot armor. It’s more fun to root for him because things go wrong so often in his life.

That feeling is why so many of Spidey’s cross-media appearances focus on him in high school and college. It’s why Marvel launched an Ultimate Spider-Man that replayed Parker’s origin in the context of the 2000s, and surely a part of him being eventually shuffled to the side for a younger model with Miles Morales.

Back in the main universe, that feeling eventually caused one of Marvel’s biggest retcons ever: erasing Parker’s longstanding marriage to Mary Jane to restore him as a romantic lead and youthen him as a character. Spider-Man definitely surged in popularity in the ensuing years, but many long-term fans never returned as readers.

ASMv04 - Vol04 I don’t really have a dog in that fight, but reading Dan Slott’s recent Spider-Man run has me thinking about Peter Parker the underdog, because Slott seems so intent on giving him his due. He’s the CEO of his own company! He’s approaching Tony Stark levels of outwardly expressed genius, and Stark is rarely an underdog.

How does that play out in the final Spider-Man collection before Secret Wars?

The Amazing Spider-Man, Vol. 4 – Graveyard Shift

Collects The Amazing Spider-Man (2014) #16-18 & Annual 1

#140char review: Spidey is tired in ASM Vol. 4: Graveyard Shift; it’s all reiterations & wheel-spinning with dodgy art as the pre-Secret Wars clock runs down

CK Says: Skip it!

Dan Slott is amazing at sticking the landing of the crazy concepts he puts Peter Parker through. Everyone turns to spiders! Doc Ock takes over! Every Spider-character ever is hunted down! Yet, here he’s not great at running down the clock on the verge of Secret Wars interrupting his run, even with the assistance of frequent co-writer Cristos Gage. [Read more…] about Review: Amazing Spider-Man, Vol. 4 – Graveyard Shift, by Slott, Gage, & Ramos

Review: Butterfly by Amel, Bennett, Fuso, & Simeone

June 2, 2016 by krisis

I’ve always loved the risk/reward of a blind buy.

I’m not talking about buying a new appliance sight unseen here. I’m talking about more subjectively judged products, like music you’ve never heard or heard of or a dish of unfamiliar food of which the only detail you are only certain it is not poison.

If we always seek out what we know and have been recommended, how can we ever be surprised? Some of my favorite albums came from picking something up purely because of a band’s name or their photo, and the vast majority of my indie comic collection came from trying something without knowing a thing about it other than the aesthetics of a cover image or a few lines of promotional copy.

(How sure can you be about art until you consume it, anyway? Did that dance about architecture really tell you how great the building would be?)

That’s nearly all I had to go by on Butterfly. I had read scripter Marguerite Bennett as a co-author with a major favorite, Kieron Gillen, but that didn’t speak much for her on her own. The cover image is stark – the shape of an olive butterfly on a black background formed by the silhouettes of dozens of guns.

There was something about it that made me want to own it.

Butterfly

Collects Butterfly #1-4. Story by Arash Amel, script by Marguerite Bennett, illustrated by Antonio Fuso and Stefano Simeone with colors by Adam Guzowski, lettering by Steve Wands.

#140char review: Butterfly: an icy spy tale that doesn’t bother to wash the blood from its hands. A less touchy Alias or a less fanciful Mind MGMT. Just okay

CK Says: Consider it.

Butterfly is not at all as delicate as its namesake. That goes for both the book on the whole and the main character, for whom its an alias.

We’re dropped into a mission already in progress with Rebecca Faulkner AKA Butterfly, and from the get she seems like more of a chameleon than a butterfly. She seamlessly slides into character for a dead drop and is just as facile in her initial exfiltration. However, when she discovers her routine contacts have all been disconnected she is forced to rely on a failsafe that puts her on a path to intersect her retired spy of a father, long since disappeared from her life. [Read more…] about Review: Butterfly by Amel, Bennett, Fuso, & Simeone

Review: Wolf, Vol. 1 – Blood and magic, by Kot, Taylor, Loughridge, Cowles, & Muller

June 1, 2016 by krisis

I’m an increasing supporter of the idea of True Fans as Subscribed Patrons, a mass of individuals who band together to sponsor the work of an artist they trust rather than simply buying it after the fact.

That’s not only because of services like Kickstarter and Patreon taking root, but because it reflects how I actually consume art. Once I’ve decided your work speaks to me, I want it all. Don’t make me keep an eye on release calendars. Don’t let a middleman get a share of my dollar. Take my money whenever you’re feeling the artistic feels and I’ll gladly accept what you deliver as often as you’d like to deliver it.

The beauty (and, let it be said, gratification) of that concept has a single point of failure: editing. Artists who are free to deliver directly to their benefactors run the risk of no longer performing the “Will it float on its own?” evaluation of their artwork. That could lead to unbidden creativity, it could result in fan-pandering, or we could wind up with some half-baked dreck.

Which brings me to author Ales Kot. This is a guy whose brain I’d love to be permanently jacked into based on what I’ve read from him so far. Even if there have been a few duds along the way, the hits are very big hits with me. I’ve exchanged niceties with him on Twitter here and there and a huge part of me simply wants to say, “Look, would you like my $100-a-year up front, because I’m doubtlessly going to buy every damn thing you do.”

He’s doing the utter opposite of that – publishing his creator-owned work through Image, where there is little in the way of advances or guaranteed sales. Every issue he releases is in pure sink or swim mode; every new project must find its own fans until he has an army of auto-buyers like me.

Right now he’s swinging for the fences on every release. I get the impression he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Wolf, Vol. 1 – Blood and magic.

Collects Wolf #1-4. Written by Ales Kot with art by Matt Taylor, color art by Lee Loughridge, lettering by Clayton Cowles, and design by Tom Muller.

#140char review: Wolf, v1: pure comics magic. @ales_kot knows the perfect amount of things not to say on the page. I re-read it one second after finishing.

CK Says: Buy it!

Wolf is a powerful work of low fantasy, casting supernatural elements like vampires, ghostly winds, and a tentacle-faced man alongside the stars on Mulholland Drive and the streetwalkers on La Brea Boulevard in Los Angeles. Kot and his collaborators have conjured a bit of true magic with this ouroboros of a tale that forced me to pick it up for a re-read just seconds after I finished.

The book opens with a gut-punch image of a man on fire. Not a superhero or an immolator, but a burning man on a stroll rendered all in reds and oranges. This is Antoine Wolfe, an immortal weary of life who’d prefer not to be set on fire as much as he’d like to stay out of both spooky plots and police investigations – and, especially anything that synchronizes all of those things together.

This is not his story and we’re left in relative darkness about his history and the exact nature of his powers. All we know is that he’s the kind of death-proof, magical guy you hire to look into things that require looking into in a Los Angeles that borders directly on Hell. (Kot is vague on whether that’s figurative, literal, or both.) He’s also a magnet for supernatural trouble, whether that’s his half-Lovecraftian buddy who is late on rent or a strangely-calm teenager in the midst of a murder investigation with an X-Files sort of twist. [Read more…] about Review: Wolf, Vol. 1 – Blood and magic, by Kot, Taylor, Loughridge, Cowles, & Muller

Luke Cage, Power Man – Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated Mar 11, 2025! The definitive Power Man – Luke Cage – comic books issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated March 2025 with titles scheduled for release through June 2025.

Collecting Luke Cage

Luke Cage emerged from Marvel’s early-70s habit of stealing themes from pop culture – in this case, the emergence of Blaxploitation films. That made him only the second prominent black hero at Marvel, after Black Panther – who had become a staple in The Avengers.

Cage’s story could have easily come to an end with the waning of the 70s, but Marvel made an unusual move in 1978 – they introduced the similarly fad-based character Iron Fist into Cage’s title, rechristening it “Power Man & Iron Fist.”

A street-smart man with unbreakable skin and a billionaire’s son who mastered a secret martial art. This memorable odd-couple pairing lead to another eight years of an ongoing series, until 1986 when Marvel ended several long-running 70s books at the end of Secret Wars II. Afterwards, Luke Cage was basically put into mothballs, and when he was taken out he didn’t prove a hit on his own – his 1992 self-titled series lasted only 20 issues.

Despite numerous guest-appearances and a brief Heroes for Hire run during Marvel’s late-90s struggle, it was one man who brought Cage back to prominence despite never writing him in a solo title: Brian Michael Bendis. Bendis introduced Luke Cage as a foil and on-again/off-again flame to Jessica Jones in Alias, linking the characters from that point forward (and using them both in his Daredevil run). Then, he plucked Cage from relative obscurity to join New Avengers alongside surefire sellers Spider-Man and Wolverine.

Ever since then, Luke Cage went from occasional guest-star to one of the most prominent heroes in the Marvel Universe, though he occasionally takes a break to change a few diapers. Like Hawkeye before him, he serves as an anchor and mascot for Avengers teams and as a mentor for reformed criminals the Thunderbolts. He also has a habit of popping up in any Iron Fist title.

In the wake of his smash Netflix series released at the end of 2016, Luke’s profile at Marvel was as high as ever – with him appearing in his own title, as well as Jessica Jones and a re-branded Defenders team. [Read more…] about Luke Cage, Power Man – Collecting Guide and Reading Order