Nancy In Hell #1 – Review

By: El Torres (writer), Juan Jose Ryp (art), Francis Gamboa (color), Malaka Studios (letters)

The Story: Nancy is a trashy/sexy scream-queen who is trapped in Hell.

What’s Good: A lot if you don’t take things too seriously.  If you’re a red-blooded male of our species, there are a lot of worse things than a sexy, scantily clad blond using a chainsaw to chop up the minions of hell.  Nancy is also a strong, take-matters-into-her-own-hands character, so all is not lost on our female readers (I’ll come back to this below).

I’m always incredibly quick to hate on Marvel/DC when they put overt sexiness in their comics and sometimes that might come across as prudish, but it is really that I want that sort of comic material contained to a comic like Nancy in Hell.  You can look at the cover for this and know what you’re going to get versus reading Thor and being surprised that the she-devils are planning to have an orgy with Mephisto (and then not being able to pass that comic onto a 8 year old boy).   There is a time and place for all sorts of comics and Nancy in Hell is very appropriate for what it is.

Gears of War #5 – Review

By Joshua Ortega (Writer), Liam Sharp (Artist), and Jonny Rench (Colors)

Some Thoughts Before The Review: Being a fan of the Xbox 360 series, the Gears of War comics are something of a guilty pleasure for me. The artwork in them effectively captures the gritty violence of the game’s world and action, while the tough-guy dialogue works well enough to keep the books entertaining enough to read. I wish the Gears series had a bit more story and depth, but then again I had a fairly solid idea of what I was getting into when I picked up the first issue.

The Story: Marcus, Jace, Dom, and Barrick find themselves trapped underneath the rubble of the ruined city of Montevado. With the area unstable and crawling with creatures, the separated COGs must find a way out of the dangerous mess. The situation offers up the opportunity for the reader to learn a little more about Jace as well.

What’s Good: To be honest, there isn’t much about Gears #5 that is particularly memorable. The action comes across well and the situation the COGs find themselves in by the end of the issue is appropriately hopeless (and potentially exciting), but beyond that there just isn’t a whole lot worth mentioning. And that’s something of a shame because the creative team puts in some pretty decent work…

What’s Not So Good: The pretty decent work ultimately fails to amount to much. I understand that for the most part, Gears of War is all about mindless action. That said, it wouldn’t hurt to actually advance the storyline once in a while. I mean, I love bloody action as much as the next guy, but it gets tiresome when it seems as though that’s all that is holding the series together. There has to be some driving force moving things along. Unfortunately, I have pretty much stopped caring what that force is at this point. As a result, I just found the penultimate chapter of the first Gears arc to be quite boring.

Conclusion: While I will be sticking around to see how the “Hollow” story concludes thanks to the fairly strong finish of chapter five, I can’t help but be disappointed with things as a whole. The creative team definitely gets the appeal of Gears and successfully translates it to the page, but the whole thing just feels empty without a compelling story. Maybe things will turn around next month, but I will be sure to keep my expectations in check.

Grade:  C-

-Kyle Posluszny