Wednesday, January 31, 2024

January '24 Reading Round Up


'Twas a busy January for yours truly but I found enough pockets of time to dive into some pretty exciting books including Somna, a fireball of naughty goodness. Could this be the sexiest comic book ever? Holy fuck-a-moley is Somna hot, wowza; more please? Yeesh, hubba to the fuckin' hubba. Look, I’m not into demons and all that but if a demon haunting and turning on some chick living during the Salem Witch Trials is what’s gonna get Tula Lotay all hot in her knickers to draw the panties off of this book then give me that dang demon!

 

They call this Erotic Folk Horror. I’m not sure that’s accurate, I mean, what’s folksy about it? The parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme falling from this chick’s dress as she demon diddles? I’m not scared at all. I’m scared this will end too quickly and I’ll be looking at the solicits when some other supernatural being will be whispering naughty nothings in a female protagonist. Ooh look, Fraction is writing a tale where a Kraken gets a Mermaid all hot and bothered, sweet!

 

All kidding aside there is some masterful art going on this book. Tula Lotay is on a major roll lately with Barnstormers being one of the last books I read of hers that she totally knocked out of the park. Apparently this is a 10 years in the making collab between Cloonan and Lotay. I didn’t know I was waiting for it but I’m glad it’s finally here. What a gorgeous spectacular work these two have created, bravo to them and DSTLRY for blessing the marketplace. Now don’t get corny! Keep that Demon sexy! I

 

Masterpiece - This was pretty good. Nothing wow but good. It’s way better than BMB's ‘Jagger Rose’ offering but not even close to ‘Pearl’ which was an all time great book. Bendis and Maleev are a dynamic duo and while reading this you’re thinking ‘Can’t they just do Daredevil every month for the next 50 years?’ As far as the whole ‘Billionaire is ripped off by a teenage girl’s parents who now are missing so Billionaire now goes after teenage girl’ storyline, it’s aight. Feels a bit dated. Maybe if Bendis made it very clear he was referencing a specific current Billionaire like Bezos, Musk or Gates this would be really cool. As it stands it’s just some anonymous wacko with beaucoup bucks, woop de doo. I’m down to follow along for now.

 

 

Gargoyle of Gotham – I wasn’t really into the first issue of this book, it felt a bit goofy. The Crytoon Dude seemed a bit over the top with his pronounced tears pouring prodigiously from his face as he committed his violent acts. Also, the overall cartoonish look of Grampa’s art didn’t seem in line with the heavy story he was telling. Then I pulled the ‘Noir Edition’ for the second issue. I didn’t know the noir edition was anything special, I simply liked the cover out of the 508,223 covers that a Bat Book usually has and pulled it. Well, turns out the ‘Noir Edition’ meant that it was all in black and white with no color save for red when blood was being spilled. And you know what? It worked great! Maybe the second issue was great anyway but the B&W feel really amped up the story for me. It felt like one of those black and white anime books. Also, the second issue kind of moved the Crytoon Dude aside and focused on these weird new characters which totally has me intrigued. Maybe DC should make all of their titles black and white. Maybe that will make them great - ah who the fuck am I kidding, they’ll still suck. But this? This was dope.

 

Wonder Woman – Tom King is writing the living bejeezus out of this book. He’s writing as if he’s got a gambling or drug addiction and needs DC to keep him on payroll to so he can keep funding his vices. There’s a lot to like about this new Dubz arc and although it still ain’t near the Azzarello/Chiang level it’s waaay better than the years of blecchhh this title has been enduring. Real quickly, DC, look, can you stop with these God Awful back stories that look like they were written and drawn by Freshman at the Kubert School for comics. They’re never fucking good, they’re just extra unnecessary pages that you fluff the comic up with to justify the $5 price tag. Think I’m wrong? Go ahead and release $4 books without them and $5 books with them and watch 95% of the sales go to the $4 book. They’re trash. Please tell me how I can opt out of back story bingo, thanks. I will say I'm a little on edge with how Dubz now has to fight a new rag tag cast of wacky characters in wacky costumes in the next installment. I'm sure some morally corrupted DC editor insisted on dredging up characters reject that had to be used by King; it's like a DC rite of passage. Luckily for us King's drug/gambling habit will force him to produce a genius outcome!

 

The Sacrificers – I have a rule when it comes to comics or any type of entertainment: I can deal with violence and gore if I have to do but if you stoop so low as to maim or violently murder pets or animals then I’m done; I will turn you off or put you down. Rick Remender, who I generally love, crossed that line with his 5th installment of this book which is clearly an ode to the unspoken adrenochrome crisis that tears this planet apart. In this book one of the character’s minions gruesomely ripped the Princess’s pet in half. Yeah, fuck you dude. Totally uncalled for and a cheap way to elicit empathy towards your female lead. I will begrudgingly finish up this arc since I already have issue 6 but that’s as far as I’m going. C’mon dude, do better than pet murders, mmkay?

 

 

Red Light – So this comic is basically ‘An AI Hooker wants to escape being a Sex Slave’ story. The douchebag dude who ‘owns’ her made her in the image of his dead wife and runs an AI Hooker Brothel that’s armed to the teeth with guards and guns cuz, I dunno, maybe he assumed the Sex Robots would revolt or want to leave eventually? My existential question is this, should I really be rooting for an AI Hooker Sex Slave Chick to escape the evil clutches of the D-Bag Pimp? Like, isn’t it better to have AI Robot Hookers doing the Sex Work and being exploited rather than Humans? Aren’t we better with that? If we replace all sex workers with sex robots and lose zero in quality wouldn’t we want that? So, no more abuse, exploitation and sex trafficking of minors anymore, just, let the robots satisfy the pervs of the world? Should we feel bad for robots being used for nothing but sex? I don’t think so. But what do I know. I’m sure next week The View will have a sex robot on talking about the evil patriarchy and how it’s somehow Donald Trump’s fault that she’s a Sex Robot.



Where the Body Was - I usually don't review Graphic Novels. Actually, I rarely purchase them to be honest, I'm more of a serial monthly type dude. Yet with the comic book industry generally up in flames and hurdling to a slow death I'm forced to look for content to sate my need to enjoy sequential art with my coffee in the morning. Brubaker and Phillips are bonafide titans of the industry and put out nothing but amazing books. Seems like they've forgone the whole 'monthly' comic deal and have just been putting out graphic novels for the past several years. Their 'Reckless' series was fucking awesome. If you haven't checked out those books I highly recommend it. Their recent offering was garnering the usual gush and praise that they usually receive, but, I gotta say, it was...mnyeh. I mean, it wasn't bad it just wasn't OMG amazing. It was, I dunno, just O, no MG. I enjoyed it but, maybe save your pennies for the Reckless stuff. The big reveal wasn't even that big, it was just, kinda there. I will say, the sex scenes in the book were spicy. Are we entering a year where sexy stuff starts coming back? Oh please oh please oh please us.

 

Coming up, I bought my first Spider Man book in almost 15 years! Will it suck? Probably. Will I rip Hickman a new one? 100 percent I will.

Thursday, January 11, 2024

CRAVE #1 - Review


 

Some would say there has been a concerted effort by the World Elites over the past several decades to depopulate the planet. They’ve introduced the Climate Scam and made people think they are in fact a virus, promoted abortions worldwide, poisoned the food supply, introduced hormone blocking chemicals into any and every product they could get their hands on, made porn accessible to anyone so that it’s easier to stay at home and get off rather than forage out and into the world for love and satisfaction. Fertility, birth rates and sperm counts are at an all time low everywhere you look. All of those are valid arguments to indicate there’s been an agenda to systematically eliminate humans. But the biggest tool used by the elites to prevent humans from meeting, copulating and creating children and families is:


Dating Apps.

 

Dating apps are a scourge on the planet. One could argue they have done more to disintegrate and antagonize male/female relationships than any other technological and chemical advance in the history of the Universe. Yeah, sure, blah, blah, people have met their soulmates and found love and great connections on these apps. But it’s probably the same percentage of people that win lotteries or win actual prizes from those scratch off games.

 

Humanity, if AI lets us stick around, will look back upon this period of Dating Apps many many years from now and wonder how men and women weren’t using ice picks and machetes on each other in the streets due to the inordinate amount of frustration and angst that dating apps gave them.

 

I think a great business idea would be to open a space where people could post the pictures of all the profiles that made them feel useless, used, ugly and unworthy so that they and other people could walk in and scream and throw rotten produce at it. It would be like an art gallery for ‘unemployed fake ass busta douchebags’ and ‘stank ass skeezy dick teasing hos’ that everyone has fallen prey to on these fucking apps from Hades. I think the High Ranking Demons came to the Pope or Satan or both one day and said that the world still believed in God and Love and they hatched a plan together to create dating apps so that people would not only stop believing in God and Love but question whether it ever existed in the first place.

 

I’ve tried every single fucking dating app. If my soul was a dick then it would be great because they have all sucked my soul dry. I wish I could get back all the time I’ve spent on these illusions. If you said ‘You can have a chance at every beautiful in woman the world on your phone’ or I’ll let you loose naked and covered in dung on a Victoria’s Secret party in the hills for 15 minutes I would’ve taken the naked dung offer. What. A fucking scam. It is the illusion of choice. Nothing but greener grass wherever you look and it’s ruined male female relationships or any type of preferred gender relationship for a long time. 

 


 

Why? The main reason is this: Why bother talking to that cute guy/girl on line at the supermarket or sitting with their friends at the bar when there are a hundred of them on your phone? Why bother dealing with the ups and downs of what it takes to get to know somebody you really like when you can just hit the reset button every day and find someone new on your phone? What dating apps have done is they have removed us from our lives and shoved our faces and our desires into our phones. So what happens is we miss life that’s happening all around us at all times. We forgo taking a chance or making a move that’s steeped in fear and possible rejection for the easier option of a swipe.

 


 

Now? Nobody talks to anybody anywhere. I used to talk to girls everywhere out in the world. Now? Nothing. You can just feel it. People are weirded out when a complete stranger starts chatting them up. Sure, there are exceptions but in one of the largest cities in the world (Los Angeles) we just move amongst each other in silence or in packs; there is close to zero interaction and it’s pathetically depressing.

 


 

So I was intrigued when I saw a comic about a dating app. Oh, you might ask, what’s the worst dating app/site of them all? Sorry, they all sucked in unique and interesting ways. I would say the most debilitating aspect of them all is that so many times I never knew if I was talking to a real person, a real girl or a bot.  Is this hot babe a dude posing as a girl, or maybe it’s a 400 pound bedridden meth addict in the middle of nowhere. That’s why I use the Raya app because at least they vet everyone on there and you can confirm they’re real with their Insta account. Although with AI these days, who fucking knows. Still, even with thousands of real people on the we screen for real interesting people app, nobody talks to anyone or messages back. It’s a thing.

 


 

Okay, so back to this comic. It fucking sucks, just like a dating app. I don’t even know where to begin. It’s like a bad CW Show if a CW Show was spam ads on your Insta feed. There’s an app called crave that gives you everything you want when it comes to whoever is on the app. It’s set in a college environment so it’s a controlled location and supposedly once you tell the app what you want it delivers it to you. Oh go fuck yourself. I’m insulted by how cavalier it just assumes acquiescence. A lot of the hooking up has to do with ‘Oh you want so and so, they’re here go get them’. So one scenario has a meek little loser ending up in an elevator with this hot chick. Now the hot chick doesn’t know anything about the meek little loser but we’re to assume that meek little loser hooks up. Yeah, no.

 

I mean, what the hell do I know? It is college and given how horny you are in college maybe this app works, especially these days with kids so sexualized. Back when I was in college we had ‘Let’s talk about Sex’ by Salt n Pepa and ‘Red Light Special’ by TLC as naughty songs. The most risqué video was the frikkin’ ‘Thong Song’. Now they got WAP. Like basically, they should just come out with a song now that says shove your stuff in my crotch and suck suck suck; call it ‘Suck Suck Suck’. Instead of the ‘Thong Song’ I’m wating for the song called ‘Cervix’. It’ll be five minutes of someone wailing in Autotune ‘Hit my Cervix Harder!’ Regardless, this is a comic and I need a, you know, a story, which would be nice. There’s some flimsy plot about a normal looking dude who has a blah normal looking uppity girlfriend that he ditches for this other hot blonde chick who ignores him but who is probably on the app doing naughty things and gee, I wonder, will he end up doing naughty things with her? Yaaaaawwwn.

 

Yes the hot blonde that grips this normal dude who has zero likability is the chick on the cover with the nipple tape. I would say as a rule of thumb if you see nipple tape at a chick’s place, run. Is there a preferred nipple tape brand or do they just get by with 3M or Scotch tape. I wonder if that’s like a convo in nipple tape circles. Maybe when you see a bunch of scantily clad hotties arguing in a club it’s not about men or where to shop it’s about the pros and cons of using duct tape as nipple tape versus caution tape.

 

Oh, that’s another thing, the roommate of the lead boring loser leaves for the weekend or something and before he goes he leaves a post-it note on a desktop monitor to warn his roomie to not use the Crave app. Are you fucking kidding me? Do you think college kids even know what a ‘post it’ is other than to mean put that reel up of you puking on so and so on your Insta account? And really? A desktop monitor in a college dorm??? Oh yeah, I’m sure college kids are all about old school 15” desktop iMacs, or are they Commodore 64s on their desks? How ridiculous, I’m gonna write a comic about a dating app and use a post-it note on a desktop monitor as a plot device. I suppose in the next issue our lead loser gets a message on his answering machine that he doesn’t get in time and he’s also unable to receive pings on his Motorola two-way pager. Oy vey.

 

Another major gripe that I have is I’m totally taken out of the story by this Maria Lovett person putting her name on a chunk of the panels. What is this shit? Is this a thing now? The dude who did Scott Snyder’s ‘Night of the Ghoul’ did this, some Franky Franachancavilla dude. Is this like comic book artist tagging? I get yanked out of the story when I’m reading it and I see a name on the art, like it just pops my imagination bubble. Look at this:

 



 

Those little circles in the corner, which are all over the comic, have her name in it and the year although the year is 2022 which tells me, hmm, what does it tell me, it tells me that there should still be zero references to post-it notes and fucking desktop monitors!!!

 

I will leave you with this. Here’s the thing with dating apps. I’ve met my share of girls off of the apps. Maybe one or two at most looked like their pictures and of them all maybe only one or two did I feel like I had an actual vibe with. Everybody else was a major disappointment or when we met it felt awkward and wonky despite our dozens of messages that we had sent each other. The reason being is that nothing beats vibe. Nothing beats the feeling you get when you see someone in person for the first time and it’s far more of a surer thing to get that vibe from meeting someone out in the world than it is to connect with them on the illusion that they’re projecting on the app. Period. Yes, I hear from many that this is the organic way of meeting somebody these days and to that I say, go fuck yourself. 

 


 

The tag line of this comic is ‘Tell us what you Crave – We’ll make it happen’. Okay, I crave that all dating apps would go poof and we’d get back to the joy of finding someone in our day to day lives again.

 

Crave? Swipe left.

 

Rating: 5.5

Verdict: Drop

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