Pow!

I had this in a standing order due to a crossover with Doom Patrol but I have quite a soft spot for Zatanna whose costume is a crazy mash up of formal stage magician and dancer.

This is a world event storyline and I've not read anything else, apparently most of the world have fallen asleep and are trapped in their nightmares. For Zatanna these fears manifest as her dead petty criminal father being mean to her. While the script was a bit leaden I actually liked the way the interior dialogue explored the ambiguous nature of bad parenting and a child's need for approval.

I liked David Baldeon's art and cartoon style take on Zatanna but the antagonists were a bit generic, although the lack of character in them isn't exclusively the artist's problem.

Ultimately there's no consequences in the story as it just get's us from A to B in a crossover story but it was more charming than annoying along the way.

I picked up these on the basis of Beck Cloonan writing and the excellent Jorge Corona/Sarah Stern covers (#9's cover).

They are fun and Neil Googe's pencils seem particularly suited to the bantz heavy talking heads style of the script. Ultimately though the plotting just didn't grip me as a periodical and this might be one to enjoy from the public library when it's collected.

This story is a lot better than the first one in this series (if it is a series). A pre-Columbus murder cult is abducting and murdering children and a local sheriff and a private detective are attempting to save the latest victim. It rattles along mixing the Mason Family with Mesoamerican fantasies.

Each issue ends on a satisfying cliffhanger but given that the tale is being narrated by the sheriff at the end of his career the tension generated is never really thrilling. Overall the story is slightly baggy often decompressing the narrative needlessly when the malice and tension should be mounting.

It does help do some worldbuilding as to why things are so miserable in this part of Texas and makes the supernatural element plausibly deniable why clearly being the intended root mystery of what is happening here.

The art is dynamic with a thoughtful set of palettes and colouring.

I absolutely love the Steve Skroce art in this series which runs the gamut of post-apocalyptic cliches from cannibals to beautiful killer robots. Geoff Darrow provided some of the variant covers and his work is absolutely a reference point for this series.

The core plot is the downfall of a corrupt survival bunker that was meant to allow for the rebirth of the American system after disaster but corrupted by capitalism fell into decadence and irrelevance. Definitely a story for a Trump-era America.

Resistance members in the bunker have made contact with another centre they think can assist their cause. But like every dystopia there are no real heroes and no real allies. Only our protagonists can form a better society and it will be built on the ruins of the old.

The fight scenes are all fantastic, this is where the art really shines with non-stop kinetic action. When the setting shifts to the West Coast the story takes a turn for the theme park surreal.

It's really the way the action is linked together than is problematic, Carolyn is the real protagonist of the story with a traumatic backstory that is explored out of the course of the story. Everyone is flat with a "tell not show" approach to what is happening to them.

Only Carolyn suffers true highs and lows of emotion and then seven issues doesn't allow them to properly be explored because everything is simply going too fast.

Every other death, maiming or debasement is simply a storybeat to be reversed in the next issue, robbing the story of consequence.

The destruction of the last resources of humanity provides a curiously downbeat note to the story, surviving has to be enough; thriving is naive or utopian even in this fictional story.

Post-Americana is a hell of an action flick but it is ultimately empty and unsatisfying outside of that action.

So predictably our journey in this zone ends with a big battle and an escape from improbable odds. The resolution is nihilistic initially (an everybody loses play by diplomat Chang) but then the tedious love story between Val and Ace resolves and moves on again. The Destiny Man returns and still lacks depth and real motivation despite an attempt to reveal the mystery of their identity and inject a new motivation for his animosity.

This arc is meant to bring us to the halfway point of the series and I'm probably dropping off here. Ultimately this comic is struggling to say something about modern America as the culture is changing faster than the team can keep up intellectually. While race is touched on in this arc it's mostly to try and acknowledge that the black American experience has a different perspective to the main narrative of the story. The black character is setup to create a new story in the possibility zone but literally ends up throwing away their ideas acknowledging that they weren't sufficient.

The story simply isn't providing enough suspense and mystery in the narrative or a deep enough empathy for the characters to invest in what happens to them.

I was surprised to see this turn up in my standing order. I thought it was a mini series (and a disappointing one at that). This turns out to be a new story arc with a different tone and featuring the sheriff from the earlier story but also jumping to an earlier case in the Seventies that the sheriff is now trying to find some conclusion on (before he retires I guess).

It was hard to care about the characters in the previous storyline it was like a poor version of the Fargo TV series, neither funny nor moving.

This one has some pretty big topics race, child kidnapping and murder; Satanic style cults explicitly demonstrating a shared aesthetic with the Ku Klux Klan. It's bigger, bolder and possibly shlockier.

After two issues the stage is still being set with players still being introduced and the stage still being set. In some ways it's nice to see a story moving at its own pace but still as with the first arc there can be a sense that the story moves so slowly it becomes aimless.

These two issues take to the Possibility Zone, the creative myth making of America (the central theme of this comic so far). In what seems to be an unironic take on the issue the Zone is dead filled not with creators but the leftover creations of the disappeared creators.

Of course it's a bit too much to ask what it would be like to be a creation abandoned for 300 years. This isn't Frankenstein you know. What happens is that you go mad, murderously mad and the expedition crew naturally have to fight and kill them. Just as they've done in all the other Zones. Because at it's heart everything in America is driven by violence.

In this story arc we're seeing Argentinian journalist Val's backstory, born to wealth and power and with a life overthrown by war and revolt. It's slightly more interesting than some of the others, less so than Ace's. There's some meta humour about comics and superheroes. It's all okay.

The gang has to create the Great American Novel to escape the Zone and move on. Since you know that there's not really a story unless they succeed and you know that ultimately they have to reach the end of the quest there's not a great deal of narrative tension. The most that is at stake is whether any character you care about is going to make it. The problem there for me is that I'm not particular invested in any of the characters or the overall jeopardy of a cure for the world plague.

I'm on the verge of cancelling but let's see how this arc plays out.

It starts off easy enough, you and your friend want to create a comic that celebrates American exceptionalism and Euro-American myths.

Your plot involves a version of the United States that has sealed itself off and a mixed team chosen from the consolidated other nations "left outside".

You're writing about an America that has literally walled off it's land borders.

But okay, maybe you had this idea before Trump.

The comic is quite violent though, violence is the essence of America. A man has his foot bitten off by a mutated bison, the scene is so unpleasant that I then didn't read the rest of the issues that piled up for the rest of the first two UK lockdowns. Finally during the third lockdown I binged my accumulated list.

Having entered forbidden America the characters in the story must "walk the spiral" to the heart of America. As I read the editorials at the end of each comic I also saw the creators descending their own spiral into the horror of the real world and how it reflected on their creation.

Did they have a global disease that threatened humanity? They did. When George Floyd was murdered they looked desperately at how their comic reflected, almost glorified, white supremacist violence and made it central to their vision of the United States. The whole thing became a horror show. They buried America in trying to praise it. They got their rights sale. Maybe this will make a better TV series.

Undiscovered Country is professionally written and drawn it's all high-quality production. It's only really the entire concept for the series that is unsatisfying and tone deaf to the world that has unfolded around it.

This volume is surprisingly rapey and frankly unpleasant for what is normally a lightweight comedy comic. The second story features a character, Drowny, who murders her friend to end her suffering during her violent gang rape.

The main story's character, Alexandra, accepts or is drawn to abusive men and ultimately is imprisoned and inevitability raped. When she later takes revenge on her abusers she kills another woman rather than the guilty men.

In both of these cases the sexual violence could be important narrative points told with sensitivity and anchoring the character arcs but in both cases it feels that this is a passing incident amongst many.

Drowny's story is relatively straight-forward narrative of someone who becomes a monster through poor treatment and rejection of her attempt to return to a moral life. At the end she does take control of her own life and responsibility for her own violence but in the context of accepting a side and a place in the war that rages around her.

Alexandra is already a killer and a monster before the story starts; she's ruthless and the story is unremittingly dark. She's an intriguing protagonist but she leaves the story unreconciled and unfulfilled. Worse still she takes out her rage at the world on another woman rather than the abusive men that ring her world.

Both stories writhe with unexamined feminist concerns and both feel like stories about women written by men and perhaps both would work better with male characters.

The first half of this miniseries is hideously overwritten full of portentous allusions to toxic masculinity and the cycle of abuse.

It traces dual storylines: one set in Vietnam during the American occupation and the other in contemporary Mexico where American mercenaries interact with Mexican cartels.

Neither tells anything interesting or new about either conflict. Despite what some of the inner voice of the captions say about the nature of masculinity, the story ultimately boils down to a duel between two men. A tedious battle for supremacy and revenge between two white men wrecking havoc on those around them.

The black character's story is clearly secondary. Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods had more interesting things to say about Vietnam, racism and the legacy of war.

The art is fine but also wouldn't feel out of place in a Punisher comic making you wonder what the creators are trying to say here.

This isn't a bad comic, it wasn't my thing but the real problem is that it feels unnecessary.