The Adventures of the SuperFisters!

Doctor Strange: The Oath

A review and dramatic reading of "Doctor Strange: The Oath," Issue 1, by Vaughan Martin Lopez Rodriguez, with possible suprise guest appearances.

Nextwave

A Delightful Interview with Justin Hall

Meet Justin & Friends on Friday, September 22, at 7pm, at A Different Light.

American Born Chinese, Gotham By Gaslight, Dummy's Guide to Danger

American Born Chinese is a collection of three stories, told simultaneously and finishing with an unexpected cross-pollination: one is a cute retelling of Journey to the East (with some slightly distracting Christian imagery sprinkled in), another is a Wonder-Yearsy memoir of a young boy named Jin who feels left out of local American culture because his parents are Asian, and the other is a sitcom called "Everyone Ruvs Chin-Kee," in which a very average white boy named Danny is mortified by his astoundingly offensive Chinese cousin. Gotham by Gaslight, by Brian Augustyn, Michael Mignola, P. Craig Russell, and Eduardo Barreto, takes the Batman legend and turns it UP-SIDE-FREAKING-DOWN by having Batman do exactly what he's been doing all along ... only a hundred years ago. In this curly re-imagining, Gotham of 1906 is terrorized by Jack the Ripper and a Jokery madman, and it's up to suave gadfly Bruce Wayne to blah blah blah like he always does. The conversation probably went something like, "Okay, I've got it ... we keep writing Batman stories exactly like we have been ... only now he's in 1906!" "Wait, why is he in 1906? I mean, is there any reason for him to be in 1906?" "Um, no." "Good enough for me. Now, let's go get drunk and cry." And then there's "The Dummy's Guide to Danger," in which the best private eye in LA solves crime while toting around his partner: a ventriloquist's dummy who he insists can talk. Both the dummy and the dick have plenty to say; they're both hard-boiled tough-talking type-A manly men, unphased by gore and undeterred by threats. In issue one, they rough up a perv, they schmooze with a sexy lady reporter, and they narrowly avoid being run over by a car driven into their office by a starlet whose head's just been chopped off. Neato.

The Boys, Savage Brothers, and Casanova

It's the end of days, lakes are on fire, it's raining frogs, and zombies roam. Dirty toughguys Otis and Dale Savage make a living as bounty hunters -- folks pay them to track down the specific zombies that were their family members, and assure that their undead loved ones are put to a specific end. It's a good enough living, and they take their apocalyptic setting with teeth-gritted good humor. And then a mystery man in a suit comissions them to retrieve a zombie doctor from the dangerous zombie slum of Atlanta, and they proceed to get chased, shot at, and then stumble across a head in a jar who's about to sacrifice a virgin stripper. In other words, things get interesting. It's all well and good that superheros charge around saving the world, but what happens when they're not very good at it? Now and then there's bound to be a few screw-ups, innocent bystanders hurt, that sort of thing. The Boys, by Garth Ennis (of Preacher fame) and local artist Darick Robertson, follows crime-fighting from the perspective of the victims -- people who've been hurt by careless superheroics and who make it their business to see that the superheros pay. Reading Casanova, by Matt Fraction and Gabriel Bá, feels like a homework assignment. What's happening here? From one panel to the next, we're leaping all over the place, and everyone's talking about stuff we've never heard about like we're supposed to be able to follow along. The book sort of feels like it's had all its exposition stripped out. Having too much exposition sucks, but having none at all is just disorienting.