Five Weapons #5 – Review

By: Jimmie Robinson (story & art), Paul Little (colors)

The Story: Pop quiz at the School of Five Weapons!

The Review: As difficult as it is to find a teenager who’s got his act together, it’s almost as difficult to find fiction about teenagers that’s got its act together.  As the characters meander in that tense gray area between immaturity and responsibility, they often guarantee that the story will go through a rapid shifting of tones, one moment reveling in its own juvenile obnoxiousness, the other striving desperately to be taken seriously.

Such is the case with Five Weapons, which from its very premise seems incapable of stepping away from its childish good humor long enough to tell a story grown-ups can appreciate.  It strikes me as odd to write about an assassin school, but never allow any character to actually die.  This lowers the stakes of the series quite dramatically, making it hard to get invested in any skirmish, since no one is really at risk of a fatality or even lasting injury.

Five Weapons #4 – Review

By: Jimmie Robinson (story & art), Paul Little (colors)

The Story: It turns out even assassins lie about their age sometimes.

The Review: I’m not quite the devoted manga reader now as I once was, but there are still a few I follow with some regularity.  As someone who reviews monthly comics, I find the weekly format of manga an interesting beast.  While I do like getting a complete story more quickly and in even doses every week, I do think the grind of turning around a product in that short amount of time does result in a lot of filler and plot formulas repeated to exhaustion.

I guess what I’m trying to say is we’re all pretty lucky that Five Weapons isn’t a manga.  Even as a monthly mini, the pattern of Enrique challenging a club president and tricking them into defeat has already started staling.  His triumph over Darryl the Arrow is about as ingenious and complex as all his previous victories, which is to say not very.  Given that Darryl obviously picked up and finished the race with a target last issue, we all knew that for Enrique to win, the target couldn’t be real.  Still, kudos to Enrique for tapping into a legitimate weakness from Darryl’s choice of weapon rather than just pulling off a simple switcheroo.

Five Weapons #3 – Review

By: Jimmie Robinson (story & art), Paul Little (colors)

The Story: All of us would be more motivated to race if there was a kiss waiting at the end of it.

The Review: I knew from the start that Five Weapons isn’t really aimed at the adult reader.  With names like Jade the Blade and Joon the Loon, you know that Robinson’s appealing to a more innocent demographic.  Even so, I continued to labor with the idea that this title would fall along the lines of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-type series: upbeat and fun, but with a serious side as well, open to more angst and violence than, say, something from Johnny DC.

This issue forces me to recalibrate that understanding.  Five Weapons sits comfortably between TMNT and Tiny Titans in the maturity spectrum of comics.  It’s not quite as frothy as the works of Art Baltazar and Franco Aureliani, but it doesn’t seem given to moments of sobriety the way TMNT frequently does, either.  In other words, it has just enough narrative complexity to occupy the mature mind, but not enough to challenge it.

Five Weapons #2 – Review

By: Jimmie Robinson (story & art), Paul Little (colors)

The Story: The Staff Club motto: speak softly and carry a big stick—minus the “softly” part.

The Review: I have a pal who’s an aspiring screenwriter/film director/producer.  When you go to his house, he has stacks of DVDs lying around, and all of them are “good movies”: Hitchcock, Scorcese, and Kubrick; French, Italian, and Dutch art films; movies watched by fewer people than those who read my reviews.  You’ll find a lot of stuff about the nature of life, death, the unbearable lightness of being, but you won’t find, say, Princess Bride or Airplane!*

I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t go through those movies endlessly without some kind of break where we watch something just out of fun.  That’s the same sentiment I have about comics, but if anything, the world of comics has even fewer works that operate on a purely fun level.  That’s why titles like Five Weapons are kind of a precious commodity in this market.  Sometimes, it’s nice to read something that embraces silliness with only a wink of irony.

I Love Trouble #2 – Review

By: Kel Symons (writer), Mark A. Robinson (art), Paul Little (colors) and Paul Brosseau (letters)

The Story: Felica gets into hijinks.

Quick review: Much like I Love Trouble‘s debut, this issue is defined by the art and the main character, whereas I’m not too sure I’m following “the story”.

The art is so different than what we usually get in comics these days.  In an era where we get too many splash pages and often feel lucky to have four story-telling panels per page, it’s refreshing to see a guy like Mark Robinson go in the other direction: He’s putting down 10 panels per page for much of this issue.  What’s more, he’s keeping it really fresh by mixing up the page designs and panel locations.  The pages have a wonderful balance to them too.  Overall, it’s very freshly designed book.  It’s almost hard to describe how much I enjoy the look of the comic without blathering, “I like the little layout vignettes and I like the cartoony characters and I love the coloring and I like the…”

I Love Trouble #1 – Review

By: Kel Symons (writer), Mark A. Robinson (art), Paul Little (colors) and Pat Brosseau (letters)

The Story: A tattooed, con artist woman named Felica runs afoul of the mob and gains a superpower.

A few things: 1). Never know what you’ll get. – I’m sure I saw this in Previews a few months ago, but now that I read almost all comics on my iPad, I tend to forget what these stories are about.  I look at the Diamond shipping list every Sunday and make a list of what I want to buy that week and see “I Love Trouble” and have no recollection of the pitch.  I’ll try most #1s from Image Comics, but to borrow from Forest Gump, Image #1s are like a box of chocolates; you never know what will be inside.  Often the issue is “okay”, sometimes I can’t erase it off my iPad quickly enough and every once it awhile, we come across an issue like I Love Trouble #1 that is a sneaky gem of a comic.

Bomb Queen VII #1 – Review

By: Jimmie Robinson (story & art) & Paul Little (colors)

The Story: It’s kind of a Bomb Queen v. Shadowhawk crossover story!

Five Things: 

1. Not much Bomb Queen in this Bomb Queen comic.  – I hate to speak negatively of a BQ title because I really love the series and think it fills a valuable niche in comicdom, but there wasn’t nearly enough of the titular character in this issue.  75% of the issue shows a group of future Shadowhawks talking and investigating a crime in the ruins of BQ’s New Port City.  That’s really not what I buy a BQ comic for.  I want to see the sexy, scantily clad, vulgar anti-hero as she does things like blow up TV reporters and city managers.

2. Art suffers for lack of Bomb Queen. – This series is always about Jimmie Robinson drawing the hell out of Bomb Queen.  He’s really made her a wonderful character over the years and he draws her really well… Heck, she’s the attraction to the title.  But, the rest of his art is just “fine”.  That isn’t to say that it’s bad art or anything like that, but in this crowded comics marketplace, you need something unique about your comic to reel people in and much as the story suffered for not having enough BQ, the art had the same problem.  Jimmie Robinson drawing BQ is what this series is about.

3. Still has some strong bits of humor. – There are still all kinds of biting humor and satire in this issue.  Robinson populates a lot of the panels with pop-up style factoids.  Most are simply statements of fact to help readers get up to speed on the new status quo, but when discussing how all of the population has these data jacks in their heads, Robinson does sneak in, “It is illegal to be jacked off.”  And, he works some visual humor into the story too when BQ does manifest (via a computer upload) it is into a man’s body, so you get the visual gag of a man in BQ attire.  Let’s just say he isn’t up to date on his waxing.

Xenoholics #1 – Review

By: Joshua Williamson (writer), Seth Damoose (art), Paul Little (colors) & Jade Dodge (editor)

The Story: A support group for people who have been abducted by aliens.

Four things:

1). Not as funny as I’d thought.  The teaser campaign for this was full of oddball humor featuring a page of sequential art of a chubby guy (think the dad in Family Guy) saying how he’d been kidnapped by aliens who anally probed him and….  he “thinks he liked it.”  That was what I expected from this issue and I didn’t really get it.  The issue also committed the sin of kinda assuming you’d seen that teaser campaign as there were references to enjoying anal probing, but we didn’t actually see THE scene from the marketing materials.  The overall effect was a comic that wasn’t funny when the marketing materials were very funny.

2).  Cute art.  That might not seem like the kindest way to describe art: cute.  But, it is the word that comes to mind and it is meant in the most positive fashion possible.  The light and cartoony art gives this comic almost its entire feel and is probably the best thing about the issue.

Bomb Queen vs. Hack/Slash One-Shot – Review

By: Jimmie Robinson (writer & art), Paul Little (colors) & Jade Dodge (editor)

The Story: Cassie Hack & Vlad go through a dimensional portal to New Port City, the land of the Bomb Queen.

What’s Good: What a delightfully funny, risque and well-done comic this was!  As a disclaimer, I’ve been a fan of Hack/Slash for some time, but I’ve never experienced Bomb Queen before.  It is always there on the LCS shelf or lurking on Comixology beckoning me, but I’ve never quite pulled the trigger because I’ve got so much other comic stuff to read.  That will change as a result of this issue.

If the purpose of this one-shot was to expose fans of either Hack/Slash or Bomb Queen to the other property (with the hope that they’ll jump on), this comic gets a Gold Star because I’ll be carving out time to catch up on Bomb Queen asap.

The story is pretty simple: Cassie Hack, Vlad and Pooch from Hack/Slash end up in Bomb Queen’s world while they are chasing a demon who manifests as a cat and while there they run into Bomb Queen.  Whether they triumph over the demon is really irrelevant to the story because the whole point is to showcase the attractions of the two series.  Speaking from a Hack/Slash fan’s point of view, it does that well as we see some of Cassie’s trademark violence (hits one criminal dude in the crotch with her spiky baseball bat!), Vlad’s humor (being called a MF and remarking that “I don’t know my mother.”) and Pooch’s earnest loyalty.  I presume that the Bomb Queen teasers are authentic (since the issue is done by Bomb Queen creator Jimmie Robinson) but they feature the scantily clad heroine, with her g-string that is overly “tight” in the front, incredibly raunchy dialog and word balloons that often point to her nether regions.