Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred #1 – Review

By: David Hine (story/writer), Shaky Kane (story/art), Richard Starkings & Jimmy Betancourt (lettering) and JG Roshell (design)

The Story: Not exactly sure, but we get an origin for the Shield of Justice character.

Four Things: 

1. Just glad to have Bulletproof Coffin back! – The first 6-issue run of Bulletproof Coffin that ended in January 2011 was so much fun.  It was such a loving, campy homage to pre-comics code comic books that also layered in an interesting commentary on creator rights.  We readers get lots of great mini-series from Image, but it’s kinda rare to see a second act because the creators often move on to other projects.  For example: We’ll probably never see another issue of Cowboy Ninja Viking.  So, anytime the creators of a beloved creator-owned miniseries come back for an encore, we should cheer because you know they’re not getting rich doing this stuff.

2. Love how the flat colors pop. – I talk a LOT in reviews about wanting more flat, primary colors in comics.  Bulletproof Coffin is a great example of what I’m talking about.  These pages are just alive.  For anyone who doubts me, take a nicely colored Marvel comic (say, Fantastic Four colored by the reliable Paul Mounts) and open it up and do the same thing with Bulletproof Coffin.  Now walk to the other side of the room and see which comic can still catch your eye.  Flat colors just have a power to them that can never be matched by this highlighted crap.

3. Not really sure what it’s about yet. – I really struggled about what to write in “The Story” section up above because it isn’t at all clear what is going on (yet).  We DO get an origin for the Shield of Justice vigilante character that we met in the first miniseries, but how this relates to the opening scene of a naked man tunneling under a graveyard and coming up in the middle of other Bulletproof Coffin characters is beyond me.  Surely there is some meta-commentary going on here; I just don’t recognize it yet.

The Bulletproof Coffin #2 – Review

by: David Hine (story/writer), Shaky Kane (story/art), Richard Starkings & Jimmy Betancourt (letters)

The Story: Steve Neuman is a “Voids Contractor”.  He cleans out the houses of the dead when they have no heirs, but he has a sweet deal with his boss allowing him to enter the night before and snatch any especially precious items.  Steve is also a comic geek with a full-on comic geek lair in his attic, so when he finds a stash of old Golden Nugget comics in a house he’s working on, he is like a pig in shit.  Not only that, but he finds what appears to be the costume of the Coffin Fly (one of the Golden Nugget heroes).

What’s Good: I was tremendously disappointed not to be able to review the first issue of this new series at WCBR because my LCS didn’t have it, but I’m going to pour a little love on it here.  Anyone who reads my reviews here knows like I like whack, off-the-wall comics when I step away from Marvel/DC.  But sometimes a comic is just whacky.  I enjoy it, but at the same time I’m glad it is a 4-issue series because I know it’ll get old pretty fast.  Bulletproof Coffin is both whacky and GOOD.  Hine and Kane have enough of that weirdness in here to satisfy people who have already read their Captain America this week, but on top of that they are building a fleshed out world.  That is a very hard thing to do.  Many creator-owned comics try to build a world, but it is usually boring as hell to watch while they do it.  So when you read a review of those comics, you’ll see comments like, “I’m going to stick with this through the first arc because I think I like where they are going with these concepts.”  None of that here: You’ll marvel at the world building AND enjoy every panel of comic goodness in Bulletproof Coffin.