’68 #3 – Review

By Mark Kidwell (story), Nat Jones (pen and inks), Jay Fotos (colors) and Jason Arthur (letters)

The Story: What’s worse than being ordered to fight in-country at the height of the Vietnam War? Being ordered to fight in-country at the height of the Vietnam War…with zombies. What the troops there can’t know yet, of course, is that the zombie plague has spread…and there’s a good chance that no one will have a home to go back to.

What’s Good: God I love this series. Not only does Kidwell move deftly between military drama and outright horror, he captures the essence of time and place so well. Whether it’s in the middle of a Vietnamese jungle outpost, or a campus protest in California, the way Kidwell is able to establish the period so well lends a fantastic verisimilitude to the story that helps immensely when the dead start attacking.

Jay Fotos continues to do an excellent job on the artwork, although he has less to work with in this issue than he has in the past. (Lush, dark jungle and looming military equipment seem to provide better atmospheric fodder than a brightly lit college campus.) The scenes of zombie attacks are quite gruesome, though it never feels excessively so. It would be nice if things were a bit more varied (even something as cringe inducing as zombies chowing down on someone’s innards gets old if its in too many panels), but I feel like that’s nitpicking.

’68 #3 – PREVIEW

68 #3 (of 4) Cover A – Nat Jones & Jay Fotos
By: Mark Kidwell, Nat Jones, Tim Vigil, Jay Fotos

Visions of home-brewed hell take center stage as an anti-war protest on a California college campus turns into a cannibalistic massacre at the clawing hands of the hungry undead. Two lost soldiers fight their way across a jungle wasteland teeming with rot. And in Vietnam, Agent Declan Rule reveals his true reasons for being in country.

Quick Hit Reviews – Week of April 20, 2011

Sheesh….we can’t review everything in full…..  🙂

Wolverine and Jubilee #4 – So, this n

ice little miniseries written by Kathryn Immonen wraps up and it is a must read if you are a Jubilee fan because this arc really establishes where she will be going forward.  Kudos to the X-creative team for taking an interesting direction with Jubilee.  I know there are some folks out there who feel vampired out, but I’d much rather have characters cast into a new status quo and then see what various creators do with the new toys than allowing characters to languish.  Besides being important for Jubilee, this was a good story if you enjoy seeing the fatherly side of Logan too.  And, of course, for the art snobs out there, it just doesn’t get much prettier than Phil Noto.  If you can find an artist who draws prettier eyes on female characters, I would like to see it.  He also get’s bonus points for drawing women who look like actual women as opposed to back-arched, DDD-boob porn creations.  Very nice issue.  Grade: B

Avengers Academy #12 – Why aren’t more people reading this series?  Every single issue by Christos Gage & Co. has been pretty good and this one continues the string.  This issue picks up the Academy kids’ battle with Korvac where the kids have had their consciousnesses placed into their future selves, giving them access to their adult-level powers so they can beat Korvac.  Not only is it fun seeing what these kids could become, but it’s fun seeing some of them (Mettle & Hazmat) being quite disappointed that they still face limitations in the future!  Great story and the Raney/Hanna art combo does a great job of telling the story.  Grade: B  

Twilight Guardian #4  – I actually kinda liked this series about a slightly mentally ill (or maybe not) female comic fan who goes out on some really uneventful patrols in her neighborhood.  This issue she runs into her long-lost daddy which is kinda cool.  This comic really has a lot of potential because Troy Hickman did the hard thing: he made me care about his central character a lot.  That isn’t easy to do.  Now, he just needs to punch up the pace of the story a little bit.  I don’t know any of the circumstances behind this story’s creation, but this smacks of a story that could’ve used a ‘laying on of hands’ by a good editor.  Still, it is a good story and I’ll be keeping an eye out for Hickman’s future work because he knows how to do the hard stuff.  The art isn’t too shabby either.  Grade: B-

’68 #1 – It’s another zombie book and while it was nice to read and had pretty good art, it didn’t seem to have a lot novel to offer beyond a unique setting (to me, at least): the Vietnam War.  The story is that of an isolated firebase in Vietnam that is about to have the shit hit the fan in a much worse way than the Tet Offensive!  This issue actually represents one of my favorite parts of any zombie story: The early stages where no one really knows what the hell is going on.  The art is nice and crisp too.  If you like zombies, this seems like a solid series but I don’t see anything stunningly unique about it yet.  Grade: C+

Iron Man 2.0 #4 – I really like Nick Spencer and I wanted this series to be good, but it just isn’t and I honestly couldn’t even make it through this issue.  For me the problem is really on the side of the art.  I hate to pee on artists because I can’t even draw a stick figure very well, but Spencer is trying to tell a deliberately paced story and this story needs the art to do a little more to help it along.  This issue features page after page of people talking about Palmer Addley in debriefing rooms.  I question that a little bit as a story-telling device because LOTS of people are going to struggle to read it, but the art doesn’t help at all.  Some of it is due to choices that Olivetti makes (boring poses and really boring backgrounds) and some of it is the choice of Olivetti for this issue at all.  Olivetti’s art is very pretty, but this uninked, straight-to-painted-colors style just isn’t vital enough to hold the reader’s attention.  Talking heads needn’t be this dull (see Spencer’s Infinite Vacation #2 where the girl in the story discusses her aversion to the technology of the story).  Why Marvel hampers these C-list titles (like War Machine 2.0) by screwing around with the art — by making odd art assignments and then switching the artists around — is beyond me.  Grade: D

-Dean Stell

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’68 #1 – Review

By Mark Kidwell (story), Nat Jones (pen and inks), Jay Fotos (colors), Jason Arthur (letters)
The Story: Summarizing the plot of a Vietnam-era war story by saying “things go wrong” might sound redundant. And in a normal Vietnam era war story, it might be. But not in ’68, oh no. In THIS Vietnam era war story, things go wrong…with zombies.

What’s Good: Let me start by saying that I’m not one of those people who’ll love something just because you put a zombie in it. I have no problem with zombies, don’t get me wrong, but the whole glut of early-aught movies dealing with them was more than enough for me. That said: holy. Crap.

I picked up this comic after doing a double take at the amazing B cover (the zombified version of the famous Vietcong execution photo). I literally just stared at it for a couple of seconds, sitting innocently there in the shelf, surrounded by the all the (comparatively) bright, happy super hero books I had come into the shop to buy. The real version of that photo is horrifying enough, both because of what it portrays and because of what it symbolizes. But this cover…this cover took that terrible image…and somehow made it worse. Perhaps more oddly, it didn’t have the (usually fairly obvious) stink of gimmick or exploitation that so many of these zombie mash-up projects have.

This becomes even clearer on reading the issue itself. I hesitate to go as far as to say that there’s a deeper, metaphorical significance to the zombies, but there is a distinct lack of the “gee whizz, cool, let’s blow up the undead with our machine guns and rockets!” sentiment that pervades so many zombie stories. This is far, far more Walking Dead than it is Zombieland. It’s unceasingly dark, extremely violent and (particularly in the tunnel-rat sequence, which I think will haunt my dreams for at least the next week) absolutely terrifying. The strong writing and stark, detailed artwork only serve to enhance and build on the mood.