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.

Initially starting with a premise of a young woman using her job to investigate the murder of her father that she witnessed as a child the story spirals into an ever darker tale of government programs and assassination programs. The protagonist is continually hallucinating, mapping Russian folk tales onto her games of cat and mouse with the retired assassins she is tracking down.

The reminds me of a more naturalistic version of Sam Keith with hair that swirls around the panel and limbs that zig zag away from the body to their terminus. The folkloric characters are vividly rendered and meshes the real and unreal satisfyingly.

The conspiracy plotline helps structure the four issues but towards the end it feels like ultimately this is just a story where people try to kill one another and as the truth of the protagonist's past is revealed things fall into place but not necessarily in a surprising way nor one that deepens or enriches the basic story. By the end I felt that this is probably a riff on the Black Widow origin story (which would also explain the name).

Bang is part metaphysical genre exposition is the style of Doom Patrol or the Invisibles and part genre pastiche.

A writer with an automatic writing machine is able to predict the future, or potential make pulp action heroes become real people. As his writing reveals the end of the world and the way to avoid it he attempts to fulfil the "final adventure" by bringing the subjects of his novels together into a "superteam".

Issue 1 features a take on James Bond where different people are essentially brainwashed with the same set of memories. An amusing explanation for the various Bonds and their different interpretations of the role. The other characters all refer to this character as a misogynistic sociopath but don't seem to hold that against the current incarnation which is a bit odd.

Issue 2 is a take on Die Hard with the John McClane character using inhalers to give himself superhuman abilities. The twist here is the antipathy the various terrorists have with the character that means he ends up in the Die Hard situations repeatedly. It's not as clever as the first issue but the character is more likeable and the powers more intriguing as a mystery but less genre appropriate.

Issue 3 seems a take on Knight Rider when the sentient AI car is deeply in the background compared to the main character who is a paralysed genius who has created a way for her to live a life as a kind of super spy. The character is really interesting but the pulp plot and gadgets just don't engage by comparison.

Issue 4 has a kind of Miss Marple/Poirot pastiche with a character who is a bit like Modesty Blaise in her youth. The whodunnit aspect is kind of interesting (with the suspects giving a suitably arch commentary on the detective's eccentric delivery) with an unexpectedly graphically violent conclusion. As this character has interacted with a previous incarnation of the James Bond character this issue works better on the different levels the story is working on. You have an exotic pulp character whose present and past she finds hard to reconcile while her memories of an exciting man in her past are difficult to reconcile with who that person became after their relationship ended and the current person claiming to be that man.

Issue 4 brings the action hero team together, essentially ending the first arc. It's pretty clear the next stage is a take on the crossover story but lurking in the background is strange meta-fictional universe and the meaning of the warring organisations.

So finally Teeg Lawless meets his appointed violent fate. Given that he is such a dislikable character and the death has been foreshadowed for this entire run it felt a somewhat mechanical exercise to read through the conclusion.

There is a twist! Having heavily outlined the probable scenario for the conclusion there's a swerve at the end which feels earned but which also renders the lead in as heavy-handed. This story is a kind of prequel to the main series, which I haven't read; maybe if I had I'd feel differently about how the story unspools.

Given Teeg's general unpleasantness (which renders much of the pulp twist at the end of the story implausible, why wouldn't anyone kill him in self-defense?) much of the emotional journey of the story is placed on the shoulders of the abused Ricky Lawless.

Ricky is really the only character that has a proper interior life in this story. You're not rooting for him, he's also the story's one piece of naturalism. He's been born down, he doesn't get a break and he isn't going to be redeemed. His spirit is crushed from an early age and he doesn't have the strength of character to overcome his numerous struggles.

His story also provides a good argument for trying to create a better juvenile justice system, although that's more something the reader infers. The pulp influence on the story prevents a deeper social critique.

The heist section at the end of the book is pretty good and is the place where Teeg's sentimentality and rage are used to good effect. The tension rises over these scenes as you know the denouement must be near and the long and short term story arcs converge.

Sean Phillips' artwork is a joy as ever and possibly for the end of this series he is the person who was pulling me from issue to issue. Thank goodness he doesn't get tired of drawing people with broken noses.

Matt Smith's art is as compelling and enjoyable as ever (the drugged gnomes and the depictions of Ugly's adventurers are standouts) but the story here probably moves a bit too quickly unless it's actually about going to be about something other than what I expected The Folklord is revealed as is a predictable truth about Ansel

The whole metafiction and ironic distance from the cliched fantasy background doesn't connect. Even if Ansel's world is simply a backwater of imaginative construction it would still be more powerful to give it more validity than it has currently. Otherwise why should we care about all these characters and their problems? Only people who know the "truth" seem valid as people.

I'm still reading and I'm still engaged but I'm not feeling that invested.

This is Kieron Gillen's take on Watchmen both visually, thematically and verbally. The blood splattered smiley, the Comedian's plummet from his apartment, Rorschach's disintegration, Ozymandius's televisions and more are riffed on and recreated.

The essential vibe is what did Ozymandius do after the end of Watchmen.

In this story what he did is try to save alternative Earths from nuclear destruction, unfortunately resulting in their destruction due to repeated flaws in his play. In a clever bit of justification of his actions he points out that he is only villainous if he never succeeds, if he succeeds then the failures are the cost of success.

Peter Cannon's power of formalism allows him to exploit the conventions of comic books, such as moving through panels and creating covers to move between dimensions.

Ultimately it is a stay in a dimension based on Eddie Campbell's Alec comics (including appearances by Campbell and Moore) that provide Cannon the inspiration to defeat himself. Exploiting his lack of willingness to change his vision of perfection Cannon is torn apart by a three by three grid.

This is all highly meta and self-referential and its entertainment value depends strongly on how you feel about that. I thought it was clever and the recreation of Campbell's comics is uncanny but it also feels emotionally unsatisfying and too easy.

I was kind of expecting a continuation of the "Young Francis" storyline but instead this is all short autobiographical comics about becoming a dad. It reminded me a lot of dad blogs, naturally, but also in terms of format King Cat.

Not really my thing at all.

A detective story set in London and created by a former Tintin artist and in a very similar style. The characters are caricatures of colonial adventurers. They hang around their club and are buffeted by events in their amateurism. Escapes are lucky, people off-scene deliver the clues required to solve the mystery (twice).

The art is excellent, the translated lettering is dense and verbose. The plot is pretty strange sci-fi reflecting an age of scientific credulity. It's supernatural elements are pretty unnecessary beyond the basics of hypnotic mind control and a flying goggle version of Google Glass.

While this post-apocalyptical vision of a wandering band of superhuman warriors is influenced by a lot of pop culture that I don't really know (Dragonball Z) it offers a vein of affecting pathos shot through its cartoonish violence.

The book opens with a couple "fusing" into one new being combining the best of both members of the fusion. A strange floating airship appears and incinerates the new combined being.

Behind the airship marches an army of outlandish warriors, who are going to be our main protagonists. Discussing the fate of the recently deceased fusion they introduce themselves in a self-consciously meta way where each character has a page showing their best power pose and the characters discuss their biography and key traits in a way that is both camp, arch and aching in the anime genre's style of exposition.

Here we learn that spy Megan has a plan to overthrow Imperious Rhaaa, their overload. Rhaaa is leaking energy and is hiding someone inside his throne room in the floating ship.

Rhaaa has banned the act of fusion, hence the punishment at the start of the story, but the conspirators first act is to break that rule and start to create a superbeing, this is the start of a spiraling series of fusions that is going to power the story from here on in. It also starts to feature various composite names for the fused characters which use puns and playful combinations to various degrees of success.

From here Megan begins to assemble an army around him but almost immediately people are resisting his leadership and are revolted by the fusion he has persuaded others to perform.

The most interesting part around the next extended scene in an underground bar is a few panels where one of the characters realises that their former lover has fused and while the resulting person retains some memory and feelings for them they are stricken by what they see as a betrayal of their feelings.

All this is in the context of absurdist violence I have to be clear. Comic combat that is grotesque, extreme and devoid of what could be considered pain, anguish or suffering. Mental torment is the most real suffering here.

The story now moves on to the confrontation between Rhaaa and a newly fused Megan (who remains the dominant personality and essentially continues through the rest of the story as a single character). Megan challenges Rhaaa for the rule of the planet and it is revealed that Rhaaa has been concealing a puppy. Rhaaa is seemingly killed while protecting the puppy but in fact goes through some kind of transition and incarnates in a new "Upset" form.

With Rhaaa seemingly dead his warriors go beserk and being fusing with abandon. You start to realise why it was banned in the first place as anarchy seems to reign as the warriors compete to fuse with as many others as they can and kill anyone they can't use.

In the sub-plot Rhaaa reveals that his rise to dominance and current affection for the puppy is driven by the killing of his puppy as a teenager by the first wave of warriors. His self-loathing is driven by his desire to punish the superhumans and the necessity of being one to achieve his goals. Marshall Law has nothing on this self-loathing!

The final act is pretty bonkers with Megan taking the form Flamegan, a huge flaming titan who Rhaaa threatens to punch so hard that he'll defuse. Rhaaa is aided by Rita Raider who refused to join Megan earlier in the story.

At this point the metaphysics of the universe become as warped as the fused warriors and essentially the conflict ends in a massive plasmic explosion that seems to destroy both Rhaaa and Megan who both experience a revelation of the futility of their existences during the fight.

The postscript sees the warriors and Rita, freed now of any overlords delighting in the puppy. A kind of bonkers bathos that reflects the genre's essentially innocent killers.

The whole thing is a mad work of love that dances the line of parody and homage. Although often hard to follow it invests a solemnity in its own logic and invests the male characters in depths of ambition, self-pity and hubris. At one point Megan begs for mercy because he is immortal and therefore fighting is pointless. It exemplifies the combination of circular logic, transcendental logic and raw cowardice that colours the interior lives of the principles. Rhaaa's reaction is to reflect that he only wishes to be loved.

The colour palette of yellow and purple seems primitive at first but then builds a sense of intensity that pays off as the action gets more absurd and titanic. The huge swathes of flame and smoke echo the mass destruction of Akira but with the throbbing colours of a children's cartoon.

Dark Angels of Darkness is a hot mess of humour, artful primitivism and East-West pop culture. It's an acquired taste but it's one worth seeing whether it fits your tastes.

Magical Beatdown melds graphic, gory, over the top violence with the magical schoolgirl manga trope.

A schoolgirl with a queer crush, illustrated in mono blue, is able to transform into a magical warrior, illustrated in electric pink, who maims and kills misogynist gang members in the defence of women.

In the final showdown the leader of the gang is revealed to be possessed by a demon resulting in pretty much a classic manga monster hunter showdown a gory, explosive finale.

It's not really my taste but the technical use of monochrome is excellent.

In an alternative 1950s America nuclear tests have resulted in huge mutant insects that are used instead of mammals for food and industrial materials.

A young boy befriends a classmate, only to discover that she and her family don't eat insects. Friendship turns into a crush.

When the schoolchildren are told to dissect a humanoid insect, the girl, Cindy, instead frees the insect and hides it in her home with the collusion of her parents. This is the inflection point of the story that moves it from alternative Americana to a horror story.

With obvious overtones of the Klan the story switches to vigilantism and choosing whether to conform or resist.

The artwork is highly stylised and while it has a 50s vibe the colour and line are discernable modern and clearly homage rather than pastiche.

I found it visually satisfying with a creepily memorable storyline.

I have finished reading Logar the Barbarian (in a dead tree version) an amusing Conan-inspired fantasy adventure comic. You can read it online for free at Harvey Finch's website.

The comic is broken down into four seasons and centres around Logar's quest to find his sister.

The tone has the right balance of portentous silliness although its adoption of 16-bit gaming framing devices is much weaker than DungeonQuest and feels unnecessary.

Interestingly Logar's quest ends with a twist but one that seems to confirm fantasy's sexism by creating a treacherous Dark Lover and emphasising the danger of women to men.

Art-wise its pretty good with dynamic art and creative panel use. The art is stylised but consistent creating an ambience.

As a relatively cheap and cheerful tale I got some entertainment but it's not the best use of the genre. I'd welcome a second story.

Demeter is a tale of witchcraft and the sea by the brilliant Becky Cloonan. As the title's classic allusions make clear it is about life, death and borrowed time. In many way the themes and circular story is similar to The Mire but the art is more naturalistic and the story a little darker.

You can get a copy via Comixology or via Becky's site.

Gold Star (from Retrofit Comics by also available freely online) is a short story using a clever split-storyline on alternating pages that tells the story of Bunny Buckler receiving an award and the the events leading up to his arrival at the awards ceremony.

The art is simple and pared down, using anthropomorphic animals as a kind of personality shorthand. It's a clever story with a simple twist structure, immediately enjoyable.