The Gathering: Pulp Heroes – Review

By: Too many to list, or even to review—check out the issue.

The Story: One serving of comic book stories, please—extra pulp.

The Review: Much as I’ve appreciated what GrayHaven’s trying to do with its anthologies, I’ve always found them a little misguided in execution.  With each contributor only getting three or four pages to himself, the most he can deliver is not a fully-formed story, but something closer to a sketch or a thought-piece.  In a comic, three to four pages are enough for a few good jokes and maybe an interesting visual/idea, but you it’s hard to get a proper beginning, middle, and end.

This is why the vast majority of Gathering features tend to feel frustratingly insubstantial; the writers attempt to do too much with their three or four pages of exposure and sell themselves short as a result.  The ones who find the most measure of success use their limited time efficiently, setting up and delivering a good punchline, but largely avoiding any greater depth than that.  They simply don’t have the space to spare for that kind of thing.

The Gathering: Ghost Stories – Review

By: Too many to list, and too many to even review—check out the issue.

The Story: I just get this haunting feeling that we’re not alone here.

The Review: It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, hasn’t it?  The fault is entirely mine.  I’m not much of a digital reading kind of person (for now); GrayHaven comics aren’t readily available at my shop; and frankly, I’m not convinced that I really want to go out of my way to obtain any.  As admirable as GrayHaven’s objectives may be, they haven’t really produced anything you’d consider truly remarkable.

They only suffer even further by comparison to their more polished, bigger-name peers, and unfortunately, Vertigo’s Ghosts is a direct parallel to this latest volume of The Gathering.  On a purely structural level, Ghosts already has a leg up on this issue in Vertigo’s choice to allow for longer features, generally resulting in more substantial, satisfying tales.  It’s the difference between eating a Hershey’s Kiss and a Hershey bar; neither fill you up like a full-blown meal, but one at least keeps you happy for a longer time afterward.

Chronographer #1 – Review

By: Erica J. Helfin (story), Edson Alves, Fabio Pio, Carlos Paul (art)

The Story: This is one feeling of déjà vu you can live without.

The Review: You have to admire the indie creators—and by that, I don’t mean the big names experimenting and stretching their legs on established publishers like Vertigo, Image, or Dark Horse.  I’m talking about the folks trying to hone their craft on the far fringes of the comics world, beyond IDW, Archie, Valiant, Dynamite, or Aspen.  It takes guts to put yourself out there without a major publisher covering your back, hoping someone will catch on to your style.

So on the one hand, I give a lot of credit to Helfin for making it as far as to an actual product; most people give up and go back to clerking at an accounting firm or whatever monotonous job they wanted to escape from.  On the other hand, it’s a sign of Helfin’s inexperience (and lack of rigorous market/editorial scrutiny) that she starts off her project with a rather pontificating little speech:

The Gathering Volume 3: Heroes – Review

By: Too many to list—check out the review, although there’s too many to review also.

The Story: Anyone can be a hero: kids, teens, old men, killer clowns—wait, what?

The Review: Anthologies can be tough to review, because you’re essentially judging the whole by the sum of its disconnected parts.  It’d be one thing if these parts all hit pretty much the same level of quality, but more than likely they’ll swing wildly between the extremes of great to terrible, and everywhere in between.  Ultimately, the question you may have to ask is: do the best pieces make up for the worst?

Thankfully, you don’t have to ask this question today (or at least, I don’t), as the newest volume of The Gathering delivers an overall solid effort from all its contributions.  You can attribute that to the format change; gone are the two-page pieces in favor of a handful of longer works.  Not only does this lend greater depth to the plots, but it allows for greater freedom in pacing.  You now get a real sense of rise and fall from the stories, making them that much more engaging.

Even with these improvements, the greater breadth of the stories is largely predictable.  Very frequently, you just need to see a couple pages of setup and halfway through you already know how the plot will pan out: the old man’s going to fade out in the end (cue the flatline heart-rate monitor); the kid knows where the missing girl is and he’s going to save her; Teen Angel and her embittered younger-turned-older brother will team up once again to rescue Beacon City.  These stories aren’t written poorly, but they don’t do enough to refresh old fiction formulas.

The strongest pieces in the collection aren’t even necessarily more original (whatever that means) in any way.  Lian and Ethan Goletz and Donal Delay’s “The Circus of Doom” features two kids taking down a circus of demon clowns and crazy monkeys—cute, but hardly groundbreaking.  You don’t know if the whole thing’s a daydream or for real, how the kids got into the vigilante biz, or even their names.  The story takes you right into the silly, kiddish action and keeps you there (the deceptively refined doodle-art also brings the wacky adventure to life); you feel its charm rather than having it told to you.