IZombie #24 – Review

By: Chris Roberson (writer), Jim Rugg (art), Laura Allred (colors), Todd Klein (letters), Gregory Lockard (assistant editor) & Shelly Bond (editor)

The Story: A background for Agent Kennedy of the Dead Presidents.

Review: This is an issue that suffers a little bit because of the news that the series is ending at issue #28.  We have a lot of plot threads that need to be resolved and (honestly) the background of Agent Kennedy wasn’t in the top 10.  Issues like this that focus heavily on the background of one particular character work very nicely in long running series.  We saw a lot of these issues over the 72 issues of DMZ and they added richness to the various characters, but I’m not sure this was the story that I Zombie needs here at the finish line.  It would be like Scalped having an issue that focused on Office Falls Down’s childhood in the middle of this final story arc: Nice, but not necessary.  Moves like this make one wonder if the series is naturally ending or if someone just decided to pull the plug?  It doesn’t seem like this is the issue the creators would have put out there if they always intended for the series to end so soon.

Afrodisiac – Graphic Novel Review

By: Brian Maruca & Jim Rugg

Review: “Alan Diesler, a frail, humble janitor in Hardwood Elementary, awoke to his true calling the day jerk aliens invaded his turf.  While trying to protect the student body, Diesler used the only weapon at his disposal – an old beat up cane – the magical pimp stick, Mackjolnir.  Slamming it on the ground for emphasis magically transformed the meek, crippled janitor into the legendary… AFRODISIAC!

This is but one of the many origins that Maruca and Rugg give as the origin of their hero in the awesome original graphic novel, Afrodisiac.  Although they were deadly serious at the time, 1970’s blaxploitation movies have become the kings of unintentional comedy and this book pushes very hard to ramp up the unintentional comedy factor while NEVER knowingly making fun of itself.

In terms of presentation, Afrodisiac is 94 pages of 6″x9″ fun.  The book is presented as a compilation of silver age comic material, so you get a series of shorter stories (5-6 pages) with random covers interspersed throughout.  The only downside to this presentation is (alas) Afrodisiac was not a real silver-age comic and unfortunately you cannot go buy the back-issues.  Maruca and Rugg made it up.  Sigh…..

Although I and most others have lumped Afrodisiac into the blaxploitation-spoof genre, the stories really are not pulled from that type of source material and that is why this book really shines.  I’m not sure if there were blaxploitation comics in the 1970’s or not……  But, if there were, they wouldn’t have been able to do more than a story arc or two about the hero protecting his turf from slum lords or white drug dealers who were selling heroin/guns/booze in their neighborhood.  Pretty soon those comics would have moved onto the types of situations you see in Afrodisiac: fighting aliens, staking vampires, dealing with kung-fu guys, thwarting killer computers, etc.