Cavewoman: Feeding Grounds #1 – Review

By: Rob Durham (story and art)

The Story: A new monstrous plagues Meriem’s town.

Review: There’s not a whole lot new to say about about each issue of Cavewoman, as each issue is pretty much like the one before it.  There is this “Cavewoman” named Meriem who is sweet, naive and innocent.  She mostly goes around in a skimpy cheetah-print bikini as she tries to help her town out of various problems.  Everyone loves her because she is nice and kind.  She takes her top off sometimes.  Dinosaurs attack sometimes.  That’s kinda what it is from a story standpoint and this isn’t the place to come if you’re looking for the next great long-form story along the lines of a Vertigo title or something from Terry Moore.

Cavewoman Snow #2 – Review

By: Rob Durham (story & art)

The Story: Meriem’s adopted hometown of Marshville is having a nasty winter.

What’s Good: Cavewoman comics are kind of a guilty pleasure.  There isn’t a lot of complex story, but the comics are what they are: A sequential tale about a pin-up cavewoman character named Meriem.  But, what makes Cavewoman comics special is that both series creator Budd Root and the gentleman who has taken the baton from Budd, Rob Durham, work very hard to keep the comic from being too pornographic.

There’s actually a lot of restraint that goes into a comic that features a cavewoman character who has come to live in modern society, but still wears nothing but her leopard-print bikini.  It’s an easy temptation with this sort of comic to have each successive issue be a little raunchier than the one before it.  Sometimes that isn’t even intentional, it is just that the creators what to give the readers something “new” that they haven’t seen before, but in doing so, they can kinda ruin the sweet “innocence” of the book they started with.

That isn’t to say that Cavewoman Snow is without it’s mature themes.  Meriem is topless in a few panels of the comic and there is implied sexual activity, but it is never explicit either in terms of what is shown or in terms of the dialog.  And, it uses Meriem to poke fun at all sorts of things we like to make fun of in superhero comics.  For example, to “bundle up” to go outside in the snow, she puts on leopard-print leggings and a fur hood to go with her leopard-print bikini, so she still has a LOT of exposed skin.  In doing so, Durham is kinda making fun of just how silly it is what female superheroes are always wearing these thong-based outfits to fight crime.  Another frequent complaint with those silly superhero outfits is how a woman could run around in them without her breasts falling out of the top, well, Durham has tongue-in-cheek fun with that notion in a great little sequence in this comic where Meriem get’s jostled and everything spills out.  It’s just great to read a comic that can show what would really happen if a woman really were jiggled when wearing such an impractical garment.  Superhero comics just have to exist on the notion that we should suspend disbelief.

Quick Hit Reviews – Week of April 27, 2011

The last Wednesday of the month is also know as “The Week When Marvel Tries to Kill Us” by releasing everything they possibly can so that we can all throw our backs out as we leave the comic shop.

New York Five #4 – Here is an early contender for “miniseries of the year” and I’m going to be highly pissed when it gets left off those lists in favor of a bunch of miniseries that end in December because comic fans have the attention span of a mosquito.  This whole series has been a really touching slice-of-life drama as we follow these young ladies in the spring semester of their freshman year at NYU.  This issue brought things home in a major way.  For one thing, someone dies and the characters are left to ponder on the transitory nature of their lives: They’re all moving on in life and the little group of friends is moving apart.  We’ve all been there and had friends who seemed like the most important things in our lives before something changed because someone took a new job or moved or signed up for classes at a different time of day from you, and you just drift apart.  That’s life and Brian Wood really nails that sentiment.  I’ve gushed on Ryan Kelly’s art before (and own an original page from issue #1), but not only does he do a tremendous job on the young ladies who are the center of this book, but he also makes “The City” a co-starring character itself.  This is a “must read” for everyone and especially so for anyone with any affinity for New York.  Grade: A 

Velocity #4 – Oh la la!  Kenneth Rocafort is a beast!  This series wraps up a very good and straightforward tale of Velocity racing against the clock to save her Cyberforce teammates from a deadly virus.  Every panel that Rocafort draws of Velocity just oozes energy.  She just looks fast even when she is standing still.  He’s got a really powerful understanding of human anatomy and muscle groups.  Sunny Gho does a pretty nice job of coloring too.  Even though the story was really simple, I think Ron Marz deserves some credit.  It’s almost like he knew that this series would take almost a year to come out and kept it simple so that each time all you had to remember was “race against the clock to save teammates.”  If you’re an art fan, this is a must-buy in collected form.  Grade: B+

Morning Glories #9 – This title continues to be confusing, but in a very good way.  Sometimes I get highly annoyed by books that are being mysterious and opaque (see: Batman, Inc.), but I think Nick Spencer is pulling off the confusion because we actually have a hope of learning some answers.  In this issue, we follow one of the students, Jun, and see his back story, how the Morning Glories Academy became interested in him and what lengths they were willing to go to in order to get him as a student.  Yikes!  Once again, I can’t wait for next month.  I’ve heard a lot of folks complain about the art in Morning Glories, but I really don’t get it.  It’s true that it isn’t JH Williams or Mike Kaluta, but I think Eisma is doing a wonderful job with telling the story in terms of his panels and layouts.  Grade: B+

FF #2 – The story here is pretty top notch as the FF has to fix Doom’s brain damage and it has all the moralistic tropes where there are opportunities to kill Doom that are passed upon.  Fortunately, Hickman doesn’t spend too much time dwelling on the morals because the idea of the FF seriously killing Doom is just preposterous.  And, we get a pretty cool cliffhanger ending featuring Valeria who is having a really nice run as a character under Hickman’s pen.  The only thing holding this back for me is Epting’s art.  It isn’t that I think Epting is a poor artist, but I just don’t think his realistic style is suited for FF.  I’d rather see Epting illustrate a crime story and let us have an artist who is more cartoonist on FF.  It doesn’t have to be outlandish cartooning. Let’s just have someone like Dale Eaglesham.  Grade: B