What we have here is a failure to communicate. Art by Masaaki Ninomiya.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Saturday was Free Comic Book Day! Per annual tradition, publishers and retailers nationwide collaborated to offer some four dozen comics gratis to any and all comers. Some comics generously featured brand new stories. Some contained excerpts from upcoming or previous works. A few were, at best, ad pamphlets. I visited four central Indiana shops, came away with 23 freebies in all, and bought additional cool things from each place.
Per my own annual tradition, my reading results came out as follows, ranked subjectively and upwardly from “Not My Thing” to “Buy More on Sight”:
[disqualified] InvestiGators Take the Plunge Sneak Peek! (First Second) – John Patrick Green’s kiddie-aimed buddy-spy gator duo had a new offering this year called InvestiGators Class Action Sneak Peek!, but I mistakenly grabbed this FCBD 2020 special from one shop that was handing out years’ worth of leftovers. The painfully punny shenanigans level probably hasn’t fluctuated since then, but I’m trying rank this year’s releases. Sorry, Mango and Brash! I tried to include you!
22. Gannibal (Ablaze Manga) – I didn’t realize this was the only manga title in my pile and the only fully black-and-white comic. For all that, I wish I’d dug it more, but its horror story about a naive new sheriff in a Small Town With a Big Secret — where one or more residents may or may not be cannibalistic — suffers from an adaptation that doesn’t know the difference between translation and transliteration. The foreign works that parlay their qualities into the best possible English versions — whether manga, manhwa, European OGNs, what-have-you — do so when they’re not just dictated precisely and anal-retentively word-for-word from their original language, but when their tones, idioms, and subtler meanings also survive the transition through thoughtfully calibrated rewriting and elaboration. Based on what’s been deemed fit to print here, the Americanized dialogue is melodramatic claptrap straight out of a Blockbuster Video clearance bin.
21. Dying Inside (Vault Comics) – If you love books co-created by celebs and aren’t worried whether they authentically co-wrote it or if their contribution was a one-sentence napkin idea in exchange for “graphic novels are cool!” street cred, have we got a book for you. Fall Out Boy’s lead poster-face Pete Wentz and TV writer Hannah Klein (who worked on TBS’ The Detour and a pilot called Kill Yourself, undeniably relevant here) partnered for this forthcoming OGN about a teenage Elliott Smith superfan named Ash who monologues through the fourth wall to the reader with black-humored glibness about her decision to replicate his suicide on its very anniversary, with absolutely no sense of forethought or gravity or writerly responsibility. Then the deed doesn’t quite go as planned and…the preview ends before we can reach any balance that’s possibly back-loaded into the rest of the book. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a comic sporting a warning label about self-harm and suicide on the cover, which only further darkens the Stygian overtones that are not brightened one watt by the Heathers-esque edgelady ‘tude of our flippant victim-to-be. This might read better in full context, or perhaps a preface about mental health might’ve helped. As an excerpt, this is…well, the art by Lisa Sterle caught my eye, but this limited portion, separated from the rest of the chapter-herd, is deeply, disturbingly Too Much.
20. Absolute Power Special Edition #1 (DC Comics) – I almost always avoid major crossover events, but I’ll usually brake for Mark Waid (though I skipped last year’s Lazarus Planet, which he co-ran). This season’s House of Brainiac event isn’t even to its halfway point and they’re already launching the next one, in which Amanda Waller plans to shadow-rule America and/or the world. This is a logical (if rather extended) endgame to her entire character arc from the Ostrander/McDonnell days to now, more believable conceptually than that time Norman Osborn ruled Marvel’s America, but it’s culminating in an era when tyrannical U.S. governments are becoming quite the villain du jour in much of pop culture (well, them and evil billionaires), which makes for repetitive novelizations of Twitter’s starkest fears. I nearly granted Waid some latitude till I got to the backup material that recaps DC’s last four major events (five if you count the House of Brainiac ads) and implies they were all To Be Continued prologues to this event. So now, absurdly, DC’s crossovers are having crossovers. Honestly, if this sprawling saga leads to any ending short of Waller being ousted and consigned to the DCU dungeons for all time, then it’ll be just another pointless exercise signifying nothing. In other words, just another major crossover event. Hard pass.
Turn Off the Dark but with a lower body count. Art by Tadam Gyadu and Neeraj Menon.
19. Marvel Voices (Marvel, duh). The latest in the series of DEI one-shots showcasing takes on familiar characters by a mix of nonwhite talents, most of them promising newcomers that maybe aren’t ready for a full-on series gig just yet. This is mostly reprinted excerpts from previous one-shots, the best being a done-in-one Spider-Gwen three-pager by singer Saint Bodhi and established pro ChrisCross (Blood Syndicate, Captain Marvel), but for most fans the big news is the lead story starring Spider-Man India, fresh off his star-making turn in Across the Spider-Verse. Pavitr Prashakar’s recruitment to costar in a pricey Bollywood production — helmed by a greedy director with mind-control powers — aims to send up that very industry, but reads awfully awkwardly in places and doesn’t have nearly enough page space to realize its dance numbers beyond a single static panel each, more wood than Bolly.
18. Star Wars (Marvel) – My wife and I gave up on most of Marvel’s SW line years ago when it became all about crossover events. The lead story by Charles Soule and Ibraim Roberson is thankfully a done-in-one micro-midquel that sends Our Heroes pre-ROTJ back to Hoth for one last bit of housekeeping with action-y results. The backup takes place in current Darth Vader series continuity, only has about two pages’ worth of Sith Lord, and is mostly a team-up starring forgotten bodyguard Sabe (whom I knew had made a comeback from Prequel purgatory, smart idea) and an OG comics character I faintly recall from the end of our SW-buying era. It references recent stories I haven’t read and ends To Be Continued in hopes of luring readers into Vader’s series proper. Nice try, but not without a no-more-crossovers guarantee.
17. Witches of Brooklyn (Random House Kids) – Sometimes I’ll find joy in books aimed squarely at girls (keep reading onward for some!), but that wasn’t quite the case with Sophie Escabasse’s series about a teen named Effie and her BFF Garance (who never leaves her side yet isn’t named until page fifteen) who learn about brewing potions and presumably other areas of witch-studies from Effie’s elderly aunts. If Nickelodeon had created their own Sabrina, it would’ve gone a little something like this, and maybe left me just as indifferent. It isn’t bad, mind you, but it’s also unconcerned with reaching an audience any broader than girls who’d treasure it instantly at face value.
Life goes on without Michael Bay. Well, for some. Art by Ryan Ottley and Annalisa Leoni.
16. Energon Universe 2024 Special (Image/Skybound) – My only must-grab on the entire FCBD list was the Transformers tale from Daniel Warren Johnson and Invincible‘s Ryan Ottley. Johnson magically made a toy-based series one of my favorite comics of 2023 with a new take on the “war is hell” heartbreak thrills of Extremity, and here finally answers the lingering question of “Whatever happened to Megatron?”. The answer should be a stunner, but was apparently already revealed in the Cobra Commander miniseries, which I missed because I’m skipping the Hasbro shared-universe’s G.I. Joe books. This piece stands alone okay except one half-human antagonist is never named, but missing out on major plot points is a too-common sin of too-shared universes. (See also: my self-imposed consternation at following all Kieron Gillen’s X-books but none of the other writers’.) Of the two backup tales, the Void Rivals short has a relevant special guest and is amusing for ongoing readers (I am among those) and a Duke mission proves Joshua Williamson’s willingness to send the Joes careening off in unpredictable directions. I just haven’t been enthusiastic about them since seventh grade when I sold all my figures, vehicles, and the Joe Headquarters playset to a neighbor kid.
15. Stories from the Atlas Comics Library (Fantagraphics Books) – Between the primitive larva that was Timely Comics in the 1930s and the corporate leviathan butterfly that is Marvel today, there lived the nearly forgotten pupal stage that was Atlas Comics — mostly a second-rate imitator of other, better companies. Marvel has granted reprint rights to the specialists at Fantagraphics, who’re now plumbing that boarded-up well to see what’s worth winching out of it in a bucket for a forthcoming series of hardcover archives. This proof-of-concept mini-anthology provides six complete Atlas shorts — three drawn by the nearly forgotten Joe Maneely (who died tragically at 32), one by a journeyman Gene Colan (before he developed his unique shaded-noir style), one by Bill Everett (co-creator of the Sub-Mariner), and one hallucination borne of the outlandish imagination of Basil Wolverton. Contemporary re-readability varies, as does the EC Comics knockoff vibe, but older collectors may appreciate having access to this missing link in Marvel’s history.
14. The Night Librarian (Penguin Young Readers) – What voracious reader doesn’t love stories about stories, where the power of reading becomes a superpower, a form of magic, and/or a world concealing worlds upon still more worlds? Whether it’s Christopher Lincoln’s upcoming all-ages OGN or more adult fare like Mike Carey and Peter Gross’ The Unwritten (among numerous others), the trick is choosing the right public-domain works to exploit and how best to explore or explode them from within. Lincoln’s foray comes through the eyes of two kids names Page and Turner (adorable!) as they’re invited into the double-secret realms beneath the New York Public Library (as seen in Ghostbusters, The Day After Tomorrow, or our 2011 NYC trip), name-check a few very familiar novels (though at least one of ’em isn’t too played out), and maybe introduce kids to the concept of meta. This mid-book excerpt stops and starts too short to convey the momentum in the final work, but it’s just tantalizing enough.
A tour through the Hall of Easter Eggs. Art by Juan Frigeri and Federico Blee.
13. Spider-Man / Ultimate Universe (Marvel) – Zeb Wells explores the possibly drunk-at-4-a.m. idea “Spidey should fight Chuck-E-Cheese!”, which gives Ryan Stegman, JP Mayer and Sonia Oback the excuse to throw pandemonium all up in our faces, which ruins poor Peter’s date. Mind you, he took his date to Chuck-E-Cheese because he is terrible at reading search-engine results for “restaurants near me”. Remember when he went to college for science? Then ran an entire science corporation? I guess half his IQ was wiped out along with his marriage to MJ, amirite? It looks spiffy, but ends with Norman Osborn, Spidey’s answer to Cobra Commander, in that he can never be truly defeated and he therefore bores me on principle. By contrast, the backup triggers none of my pet peeves — rather, writer Deniz Camp (who won my FCBD 2018, when I TOLD YOU ALL he was “absolutely one to watch”) and Juan Frigeri (Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir) relaunch the Ultimates in altered form. Whereas the Millar/Hitch premise was “What if the Avengers were pompous blowhards?”, their timeline has since been sabotaged by a madman who’s gone back and prevented nearly every hero origin story ever. The core of the new team that arises anyway will raise a few eyebrows, and I’m tempted to peek at what comes next, but I just know it’ll inevitably lead to crossovers. In this moment, before it’s ruined, it’s a What If…? with potential.
12. Disney’s Encanto & Turning Red (Papercutz). Disney comics for a new generation aren’t quite Carl Barks classics, but they’re amiable and grant their artists freedom to explore their individual skill sets off-model rather than reproduce stiff screen shots. It’s a flipbook, but every single shop understandably displayed it Encanto-side up. Side One is a standard anti-bullying lesson — that evergreen kids’ topic — though done in such a way that at first the moral feels like “The solution to bullying is bigger bullying.” The B-side is all human-panda hijinks vignettes, especially clever in tackling one choice target where children’s-book authors dared not tread in my day: how older women insist on keeping their gray hair dyed or else. What other all-ages works go there?
11. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW Publishing) – I was the sort of OG Eastman/Laird fan (my bagged first printing of #4 is worth more than some of our appliances) who turned up their nose at the massively popular cartoon that became “the” Turtles going forward. Last year’s film was improbably fantastic, but I can take or leave the comics’ recent return to Serious Ninja-ing. Apparently a recent accident turned still more NYC humans into Doc-Moreau hybrids, which is hard to notice in this story with only four live beings in it. One of Our Heroes, or another manimal of their body type, now moonlights as the Nightwatcher, a vigilante who’s masked to, uhhhh, to protect their secret identity and the safety of their loved ones/fellow suspects? A younger guy in line for FCBD told me this might be a “hot” book due to New Character Debut, but I preferred the backup story by Paul Allor and Andy Kuhn (both from my home state!) with all four turtles, Master Splinter, the Foot, a bonus Mouser, a lesson to learn, and shenanigans that evoke the really keen movie more than Nightwatcher Grimdark Blood Vendetta or whatever.
10. Conan: Battle of the Black Stone (Titan Comics) – All the basics are ably accounted for, by which I mean a list of proper nouns in the Cimmerian’s world (every Conan comic starts this way), followed by stabbing and hacking, done well for what it is, if a bit curtly. Then Jim Zub and Jonas Scharf pull back from the comfort-clashes to tease Our Hero’s next arc…which will be a major crossover event starring him and several other Robert E. Howard characters, in a tale spanning the centuries from Solomon Kane to his obscure roman à clef writer-protagonist James Allison. I feel like I should be mad, but as an enjoyer of some Kane comics, I’m more intrigued than indignant. It helps that it’ll only be a crossover between two series, not thirty of them. So I’m torn.
Once upon a time on the Public Bloodcasting System. Art by Luisa Russo and Heather Breckel.
9. Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures (Dark Horse Comics) – The Disney+ series for tiny kids also has comics! The first two pages expect grade-schoolers to grasp a fair amount of exposition to set up its tale of two Jedi younglings who both understand Basic but can’t actually speak it (a persistent artifice in this galaxy), and can neither understand nor speak each other’s native tongues, yet they accomplish teamwork thanks to, er, the Force hivemind or kindergarteners’ keen detective skills. I’m sure the target demo won’t overthink it and could use a lesson in cooperation anyway. The backup tale returns to FCBD stalwarts Plants vs. Zombies; this time the plants are Pokemon knockoffs at best and their human pals serve a single joke, while the zombies win center stage with multiple versions of the secret origin of their leader Zomboss. Silly rhyming gags add up to a shrewd li’l media-manipulation satire and real-world politicians prone to rewriting their backstories every ten minutes. I’ve read no PvZ outside FCBD, but within that limited scope, this is their best bit yet.
8. Flash Gordon (Mad Cave Studios) – Sound the cheesy movie theme, if you must! Every IP has happened before and will happen again, so why not him, too. Other than Marvel’s brief licensing of the 1980s toy-aisle super-team Defenders of the Earth, I’ve missed out on Flash Gordon zeitgeist my whole life, even the B-movie that some insist is a geek-curriculum requirement. In the hands of Jeremy Adams (who just wrapped up a run on DC’s Flash! double jeopardy!) and veteran illustrators Will Conrad and Lee Loughridge, the comic-strip space hero’s latest iteration feels exactly like one of DC’s stoic ‘80s sci-fi books, some of which probably ripped off Flash Gordon, but it’s safe to say this speedy single-issue epic has a twist ending that’s never been tried with the property before. Fans of a certain celebrated Syfy reboot might feel a familiar twinge, but now it’s Flash’s turn to deal with it.
7. Gatchaman #0 (Mad Cave Studios) – When I was 7, Battle of the Planets was AWESOME. It was on every weekday after school, and it had action and monsters and five cool heroes named Mark, Jason, Princess, Keyop, and Tiny, and they had four neat vehicles plus their main ship the Phoenix, which had a flaming form that it could turn into and save the day at the end of most episodes, in many ways heralding the show’s eventual successor Voltron on our local WTTV channel 4, but Voltron wasn’t as awesome because I was slightly older by then. Discerning modern fans surely prefer the original anime over the Sandy Frank bowdlerizations and may be content with the two stories and one preview in this revival, which retains Our Heroes’ original Japanese names and shows one scene of bloodiness that never could’ve aired way back when. It’s not high art, but my inner schoolboy thinks it’s much closer to our sacred, wowed memories than the Top Cow do-over from about twenty years back.
6. Hellboy/Stranger Things (Dark Horse Comics) – Mike Mignola flips his retirement switch to “OFF” again to write a brief encounter between the erstwhile movie star and an evil fortune teller whose sinister probing is an excuse for Hellboy history flashbacks creepily drawn by Hungarian artist Mark Laszlo. I haven’t read tons of Hellboy, but it fits in just fine. I’m more enamored of the Stranger Things backup by Derek Fridolfs (who’s done more writing than inking at DC lately) and Jonathan Case (Batman ’66, The New Deal) in which season-4 sidekick Argyle tells his new pal Jonathan all about the supernatural encounters in his life that he swears totally happened and he was so not stoned every single time. As a loyal viewer of the show, I haven’t been floored by other ST comics, but this pop single comes closer to the right pitch.
5. Barda (DC Comics) – It was just last week we were talking about how DC’s YA line is now in my narrow line of sight. Webcomic creator Ngozi Ukazu (Check, Please!) reframes Jack Kirby’s big-boned, bad-to-the-bone battler from Apokolips as the heroine of her own story rather than as the sidekick and concerned wife of usual headliner Mister Miracle. Eventually he pops up as her future love interest, but this OGN excerpt swiftly takes us through her origins from institutionally degrading childhood to recruitment into the super-villainous Female Furies, all while she yearns for a better life and maybe kicks butts on her way out of her old one. Is it weird that I’m 51 and finding DC’s YA line such a promising alternative refuge from their main continuity?
Once again the day is saved thanks to…Bluto? Art by Marcus Williams and Rodney Velchez.
4. Eye Lie Popeye (Massive Publishing) – Once more unto the spinach! Every IP has happened before and will happen again, so why not Popeye, too. It’s bizarre seeing him fight a differently cartoonish Dragon Ball fugitive (all blocky muscles vs. the Sailor Man’s bulgy curves), but the characterizations are bang-on (Wimpy is pitch-perfect) and writer/artist Marcus Williams (co-creator of Tuskegee Heirs) is here to take fight scenes back from the manga world, to which today’s Western hero-comics have largely forfeited. (Dear Marvel and DC: a single splash page symbolizing an entire twenty-minute conflict is not a fight scene, y’all.) Rather, Williams gloriously spreads the melee across pages of actual blow-by-blow choreography in a style range somewhere between Bret Blevins old-school perpetual motion and Sanford Greene graffiti-slick dynamics. It’s not E.C. Segar, but does anyone under 70 care? It’s closer in spirit to the Fleischer cartoons of my childhood and light-years beyond Robert Altman’s art-film travesty that personally offended me as an 8-year-old at the drive-in. My only complaint: why is the lettering so eye-strainingly itsy-bitsy?
3. Boom! Box 10th Anniversary Extravaganza (BOOM! Studios) – Has it really been that long since the company launched their creator-owned all-ages line with The Midas Flesh, co-created by the Ryan North? Guess so, which means I’m that much older now. Excerpts from four titles display their breadth of tastes — that same book (which I enjoyed a while back) plus Lumberjanes (in the eight issues I read, an inventive successor to Carl Barks’ Junior Woodchucks), Zawa (this one totally lost me), and John Allison’s Giant Days, which I’ve never read but now I must. His tale and the Lumberjanes short each explore “What if our cast formed a crappy band?”, but he turns “More Than Words” — that 1991 ballad with which I have a checkered past — into the rightful butt of so many jokes that I cackled with glee at every page. I need more Allison now, please.
2. Doctor Who (Titan Comics) – A week ahead of the premiere of Ncuti Gatwa’s first full season as the Fifteenth Doctor, he and his new companion Ruby Sunday have already leapt into their printed-page debut. The quickly comfy duo brakes for 1739 and a tussle with the notorious bandit Dick Turpin, who’s bearing a suspiciously advanced firearm. This teaser for the upcoming series by the UK team of Dan Watters and Kelsey Ramsay glimpses an English history moment that pop-culture time travelers never come visit, throws in a flashback montage for longtime fans, nicely captures the Doctor’s classic can-do spirit, and replicates what little we’ve seen and felt so far of Gatwa in his intro and the one Christmas special. Great start, this.
So our #1 is a comic book collecting comic strips about making comic books, like when movies-about-movies win Best Picture. Art by Dana Simpson.
1. Unicorn Crush (Andrews McMeel Kids) – In case it isn’t noticeable by now, I don’t follow webcomics. Used to be, it was because in their 2000s infancy 95% of them were crud, surpassing Sturgeon’s Law. That percentage has blessedly gone down but I still prefer printed comics because they’re my favorite way to take much-needed breaks from screens. I’d therefore never heard of Dana Simpson or the decade-old Phoebe and Her Unicorn that’s since upgraded to national syndication (albeit not in our local newspaper, because heaven forbid anything dislodge frickin’ Marmaduke from its legacy pedestal). This precis of the latest strip collection (due out May 7th) about a girl and her BFF — an affable, self-absorbed unicorn named Marigold Heavenly Nostrils — is an eye-opening, frequently hilarious, utterly surprising delight. I won’t be the first or maybe even the 10,000th to draw comparisons to Calvin and Hobbes, which isn’t a name I invoke lightly, but it’s what came quickly to mind as the punchlines took sharp detours from obvious destinations and the sometimes antagonistic sweetness between the precocious child and her impossible animal companion denied any threat of cutesy overload. I haven’t watched nearly enough My Little Pony to sense any egregious overlap, which wouldn’t surprise or offend me. All I know intuitively is this was The Best Thing I Read on Free Comic Book Day.
…
…and that’s the reading pile that was. Lord willing, see you next year!