Mad Moll Green Comic Reviews

Witch Hunter Angela is a consummate genre mash, mixing clever wordplay and goofy physical comedy with pretty poetry and totally transcendent beauty.

Witch Hunter Angela #3 is, on every level, a book about patchwork re-creation, allusion, and storytelling. Stephanie Hans, who often plays around with unconventional panel shapes, really goes to town in this issue, drawing asymmetrical, jagged polygons instead of squares and rectangles. The resulting pages often feel dynamically pieced-together, the same way that (I hope) Angela and Serah might manage to create or re-create their own stories.

In All-New Hawkeye #2, artist Ramn Prez continues the really effective visual language from issue #1, using two different artistic styles to represent the present and the future. But it's Ian Herring's colors that really steal the show here. Hawkeye #2 is a great example of how comics coloring can tell a great story all by itself.

It makes me happy that this historic issue is going to inspire new readers to pick up this comic-and it makes me really happy that those readers are going to be rewarded by a creative team making such a beautiful book.

A love story where nothing can keep the lovers apart? That's a clich. But Angela : Queen of Hel is that clich taken to its extreme. These particular lovers are a warrior who rips apart reality and a narrator who ignores and/or exploits the narrative "rules," rewriting her story any way she wants.

Marguerite Bennett continues to go wild with her signature epic-comedic style. Angela: Queen of Hel #3 overflows with classical allusions and snarky comics references and non-stop wordplay. Angela continues to battle her way through various Hel-ish trials, accompanied all the way by Sera's non-stop wit and tongue-in-cheek narration. But all that wit and cheek-tongue doesn't stop Angela from taking itself seriously"and beautifully"when it wants to.

The issues very first panel is an extreme closeup on Carols eye, and the rest of the book keeps up that highly stylized intensity: series of small, tight closeups on faces alternate with big, swooping overhead shots at weird, jarring angles, emphasizing the disorienting interplay between Carols interior battles and outer struggles, the constant whiplash between past and future that defines the Captain Marvel legacy.All told, this is a tight, compelling 20 pages that elegantly juggles big explosions, witty dialogue, psychological thrills, and sci-fi fantasy.

Captain Marvel and the Carol Corps, Kelly-Sue DeConnick's Captain Marvel elegy, was all about expanding horizons, pushing onward, moving in new directions. Contrast that with the way that Fazekas and Butters have painted their Captain Marvel into a corner, tying up her past and future in a tense, chaotic knot, pushing and pulling her in several directions at once. Yup, that's just like Anka draws this issue's action: past and present, tension and dynamic movement, all tied up in one fiery instant.

And, perhaps most importantly, DSSW#3 is just way funnier than the first two issues. The quips and one-liners are better. Bunn has a lot more fun with his non-linear timeline, bungeeing irreverently between Nowish, A While Back, Later Earlier and Now, Again. Deadpool flirts with She-Hulk and Thor and reminisces bittersweetly about Liefeld-era pouches, and still gets to (probably?) save the day in the very near future. Good stuff!

Give me gory violence or campy cheese or biting satire. Give me tragic deaths or adorable romance or self-referential quips. The real beauty of the Deadpool character is that, ideally, absurdly, you should be able to give me all those things at once.

Hawkeye #1 ends with a dual cliffhanger"in the present, Kate leaves Clint to become Hawkeye in her own way, while the future Kate is injured and Clint is cornered by the Mandarin. Whatever happens next, the past and future are going to move forward, together. And that's probably the whole point. In the meantime, the next entry in our BAMF series, all about everybody's favorite illegal music downloading, Jersey loving archer is waiting for you.

The weakest part of this book happens towards the end, as it gets distracted by a lot of complicated backstory. Maika's climatic confrontation with Yvette Lo Lim, the witch she seems to blame for all her troubles, only reveals a bunch of flashes and fragments that don't add up to much"at least not yet. Sure, it's a mystery that'll keep you wondering all the way to issue #2. But the real tantalizing tease isn't the exact details of the Battle of Constantine, or Yvette Lo Lim's relationship to Maika's mother, or who betrayed whom and how. It's the strange, scary thing that's gotten itself attached to Maika"and what she's going to become next.

And Thies cleverly adapts the horror of the invisible cinematic Predators for the comicbook medium. The Yautja really can appear out of nowhere-they're not there in one panel, and suddenly impaling a guy in the next one. Their quick, bloody kills are frozen at their most gruesomely spectacular moments. It's the perfect action-horror aesthetic: inhumanly fast carnage, but paused for maximum shock value

Ironically, the Runaways won't be able to run forever-whether that's because Bucky and Sanna are about to capture them, or whether they decide to risk everything by challenging God Doom.

Put simply, Runaways is great comics storytelling, favoring depth over complexity and humanity over cliche. It's a deeply-felt tragicomic fantasy with great honesty and humanity at its heart"a great story not just for young people, but about young people.

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In some way, most of the Secret Wars Journals explored the meaning of heroism in situations when the hero can't possibly win-the value of doing the right thing, even when it doesn't save the day. In this issue, our two heroes find out that the universe doesn't end with a bang, or with a whisper, but in a terrible Sisyphean repetition of failure and infection. Mill-E sees her quest not so much as the world's worst advertising gig, but as an effort to connect with people-even a "teensy, weensy" bit. In Linda Carter, we get a hero trying to heal the whole world-starting with herself.

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This is a story of the greatest possible scale punctuated by deeply personal loss, guilt, and heartbreak. This is the apocalypse writ tiny.

This is one of the things I really like and respect about Jason Latour's previous Spider-Gwen run: you can see him really thinking through the ethics of Gwen's vigilantism"often using George Stacy as her foil.

So, clearly, even with all this star-spangled awesomeness to draw from, Latour's doubling down on centering Gwen's story around Peter. Personally, I think it's time to move on. And I hope that there are other things that make a hero other than guilt and horror over a loved one's death (and undeath?). I think that it's time that Gwen took the spotlight in her own book on her own terms. The time for origin stories is probably over.

I recognize Harry Osborn's potential as a character who reflects Gwen's inner turmoil and motivations, as a person she can learn from. But her story is already full of characters and people like that. Maybe too many.