Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred #2 – Review

By: David Hine (story/script), Shaky Kane (story/art), Richard Starkings & Jimmy Betancourt (letters) & J.G. Rochell (design)

The Story: It’s open mic night and people are allowed to get up there and tell their sordid tales of horror.

Review: “Good, but not as electric as the original series because I can’t figure out the story yet.”  That’s how I’d sum up this second story cycle from Bulletproof Coffin.  The first series was such a breath of fresh air in comics: Weird story + pre-comic code flashback stories + great art and design.  In this issue, we still have the art and we still have the flashback stories, but it isn’t clear to me what “the story” is about just yet.  Remember, that issue #1 only showed us an origin for one of the characters.

This issue is again in origin mode as we see a jazz club MC who is opening the mic to allow people to tell their horrible stories.  It later turns out that the MC has a secret identity and is linked to the other Bulletproof Coffin characters, but we only get a few pages of that with the majority of the issue being devoted to the aforementioned “horrible stories”.

Now, those “horrible stories” are pretty magical.  Each seems like the kind of story that could have featured in an old issue of Tales from the Crypt.  The stories have a common theme with each having to do with bizarre surgical procedures performed on a loved one (sometimes with bad results).  Honestly, I wouldn’t mind a bit if Hine and Kane simply made a tongue-in-cheek homage to those old horror comics because I LOVE that part of the issue.  The only part bugging me is that there is a hint of a bigger story, but I don’t understand that story and my frustration causes me to easily lose sight of how much I enjoyed other elements of the comic.

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.