Daredevil/The Punisher #1

Daredevil/The Punisher: Seventh Circle, Chapter One is the first in a four-issue limited series written by Charles Soule with pencils and inks by Szymon Kudranski. I hadn't heard of Kudranski, so I checked out some of the artwork on his blog, where I found gobs of his most impressive work.  Charles Soule I knew from a number of DC and Marvel titles, plus his own title, Strongman.  Oh, and did I mention that this is about Daredevil and the Punisher, two of Marvel's best characters?  Needless to say, I began this title with the highest of expectations.

Daredevil as Matt Murdoch is the good guy here, a prosecutor in the Sergey Antonov case.  Antonov is a rough customer, and he's being transferred from New York to Texas in hopes of getting an impartial jury, but the Punisher, Frank Castle, has other plans.  He takes a shot at Antonov from the rooftops, but Murdoch's enhanced hearing allows him to foil the assassination, at least for now.

This is a pure action title so far, but it leaves us with some questions.  Who is Sergey Antonov?  What did he do to make the Punisher so angry at him?  And will he survive his extradition to Texas?  See, Daredevil and the Punisher are two sides of the same coin.  They both stand for law and justice, but Daredevil sees justice through the eyes of America's sometimes convoluted legal system, while the Punisher sees justice through his own eyes.  Daredevil believes in the system; the Punisher doesn't.  Daredevil has a club; the Punisher has a rifle.

One of the highlights of this title is the coloring by Jim Charalampidis.  This is a dark comic featuring three superheroes in black costumes with a black van and black asphalt, yet Charalampidis leaves no ambiguity between which black is which black.  The letterer is VC's Clayton Cowles.  I believe I've written about him before, but I like his style, using all caps dialogue and upper-case/lower-case narration by Daredevil.  It's a really fantastic title, and I'm looking forward to Chapter Two coming out in late June.

20th Century Boys, Vol. 18

20th Century Boys, Vol. 18 mostly takes place in 2018, with a brief flashback to Year One of the Friendship Era.  There are two factions in the resistance.  The Genji Faction is led by Yoshitsune, and it mostly focuses on hiding political dissidents.  The Ice Queen Faction is led by Kanna herself, and they plan an armed revolution on August 20, Kenji's birthday.  Meanwhile on the northern border, a man with a guitar has broken through the fence.  Chono is being told that he's a space alien, and that his guitar is just a guitar-shaped weapon.  He's too young to be Kenji.  Perhaps he's the busker found by Koizumi in Vol. 17.  In both Tokyo and the northern city, a new version of one of Kenji's songs is being played on the radio.

For a series that has sold tens of millions of copies, 20th Century Boys does receive a fair amount of criticism.  Some have suggested that 24 tankoban volumes is a bit too long for the source material, leading to too many tangential stories.  By the time you get to Vol. 16 or Vol. 17, that's out the window, and it's a race to the finish.  Kenji might be alive.  Might he be the Friend?

Death of Wolverine

Death of Wolverine by Charles Soule and Steve McNiven is a gorgeous work of sequential art, especially in hardcover, which is a little larger than a trade paperback.  I don't normally buy hardcover Marvel or DC except for omnibuses, but I saw this at the San Diego County Library, Bonita Branch, and had to take it home.  It sat on my bed for three weeks, and it's due today, so I thought I'd read it.  In this story, Wolverine has lost his healing factor.  He's gonna' die now that people have found out.  Just unsheathing his claws causes damage to his hands.

My favorite page was in Issue #3, when Kitty and Logan are in Japan.  It's springtime, judging by the plum and cherry blossoms, but not Golden Week judging by how empty the Koishikawa Korakuen Gardens are.  Charles Soule has been one of my favorites for some time.  In particular, I like his versions of Superman/Wonder Woman, She-Hulk, and Strongman.  Definitely, The Death of Wolverine is on that list as well.  It's a short arc at four issues, but at least it's not dragged out.  Recommended.

20th Century Boys, Vol. 17

20th Century Boys, Vol. 17 takes place mostly in two timelines, 2018 and 2016.  In the 2018 timeline, Sanae and her brother Katsuo are on the run from the Global Defense Forces, which are mostly armed with toy lasers.  Sanae must take a message to Kanna, the daughter of Kenji's sister and perhaps the Friend.  Katsuo is looking for Father Nitani.  In the 2016 timeline, it is the first year of the Friend era.  The Friend is the President of the World following his rise from the dead and his saving the Pope from an assassin's bullet.  The virus has claimed 3 billion lives, and a strange man in a gas mask is handing out vaccines to people who attended the World Exposition in 2015.  Finally, and also in 2018 (?), Chono, the former police detective that helped Kanna, is a guard in a brutally run border town.  There is a brief return to the Kanna story.

I was glad to see Chono again; he hasn't changed, but his situation certainly has.  He was an honest officer in a corrupt police force, and now he's an honest officer in a corrupt junta.  I guess not too much has changed.  The cover actually features Kenji as a young boy in the late 1960s, and there is a brief interlude in that timeline as well.  And like I've said in the past 16 reviews of this title, I'm a huge fan of Naoki Urasawa, particularly Monster and 20th Century Boys.

On Stephen King

Stephen King is easy to read, easy to enjoy.  That's why I read him.  I started reading him in summer of 1984, when I was 11 years old.  I read Firestarter, and I was pretty proud of the accomplishment.  When I told my sixth-grade teacher that I'd read it the following fall, she told me that Stephen King isn't a serious writer.  I fell for it, not for the idea that Stephen King wasn't a serious writer, but for the idea that anyone isn't a serious writer.

Fast-forward 30 years.  After reading On Writing, I decided to read King's short stories.  I read every collection.  Since 2014, I've read:

• Carrie
• The Shining
• Firestarter
• Cujo
• The Running Man
• The Gunslinger
• The Drawing of the Three
• Misery
• The Waste Lands
• Wizard and Glass
• Wolves of the Calla
• Song of Susanna
• The Dark Tower
• 11/22/63
• Doctor Sleep
• Mr. Mercedes
• Finders Keepers
• On Writing (nonfiction)
• The Night Shift (short story collection)
• Different Seasons (novella collection)
• Skeleton Crew (short story collection)
• Four Past Midnight (novella collection)
• Nightmares & Dreamscapes (short story collection)
• Hearts in Atlantis (novella collection)
• Everything's Eventual (short story collection)
• Just After Sunset (short story collection)
• Full Dark, No Stars (novella collection)
• Bazaar of Bad Dreams (short story collection)

My favorites are the novella collections, the short story collections, The Shining, 11/22/63, and Finders Keepers.  While I wouldn't count King among my eight or 10 favorite prose writers, his books are easy to find at the library and overdrive, and I've even bought a few.  

Saga #36

Saga, Issue #36 sees Marko reunited with his mother Klara and his daughter Hazel, who are on a high-security Landfall prison.  Meanwhile, the Will is chasing Prince Robot IV, and just as he's about to kill Prince Robot IV's son in a fit of anger, he sees a vision of his sister, the Brand.  The vision of his sister tells him... well, you'll have to read it to find out.  All I can say is that this is a hell of an episode and a great way to end the sixth arc.

Saga reminds me a little of the stories of Neil Gaiman or Doug TenNapel, both of whom have the ability to break the reader's heart and mend it again.  That's what Vaughan does in separating Hazel from Marko and Alana, only to reunite them at the end of this arc.  And that's not even getting into the beautiful artwork, coloring, and lettering.  I love this title.

Old Man Logan #5

Old Man Logan, Issue #5 starts the new arc, "Bordertown."  After rejoining the X-Men, Old Man Logan leaves to be on his own.  He heads far north, to Killhorn Falls, in the Northwest Territory of Canada, bordering Alaska.  At Killhorn Falls, Wolverine remembers his past, meeting Maureen, his wife in another universe, on another Earth.  The younger girl he meets is named Maureen, and I doubt this is a coincidence.  He wants to keep her safe, but will his presence cause more danger than his absence would?

I've read a number of Canadian cartoonists, including the "Big Three" of Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and Seth, but none of them capture Canada the way Jeff Lemire does.  That doesn't mean I haven't enjoyed his comics that have nothing to do with Canada, like Descender, but the "Big Two" publications have always tried to put Lemire in Canada, like with Justice League United, which takes place in Moose Jaw, Canada.  Or maybe, it's the other way around.  I shouldn't really comment on comic-book politics.  "Bordertown" more clearly captures small-town Canada than Justice League United does because this issue actually takes place in a Canadian town, rather than a hole in the ground that could have just as easily been in Venezuela.

Old Man Logan also is the better for the artwork of Andrea Sorrentino, who portrays snowfall in a classical way, with large blobs of snow.  While this is reminiscent of artists from Charles Schultz to Jacques Tardi, Sorrentino puts his own spin on the genre with help of colorist, Marcelo Maiolo.  Snow near the view is larger, of course, but the smaller snow farther away also has a blueish tint to it. It's a beautiful comic, and my favorite piece of artwork in it is the two-page spread with five vertical panes showing Old Man Logan's motorcycle in five different climates, along with a sixth, horizontal plane showing Logan in Canada, finally.