Just the Facts-imile Issues & Reviews

        

 

Yeah, I'm back and I know it's been a while. I don't know where the time went. How is it June already? I feel like it was only last Tuesday where I was cursing Valentine's day and pouting that nobody invited me to a Super Bowl party and now it's fucking June. Well, I'm back because it looks like some Marvel Intern or Lackey has been snooping around this blog for ideas to boost their sales and revenue so I figured I should post something. How do I know they've been doing that? Well, they finally decided to take me up on my idea to not only release facsimile issues of their great comics of the 60s from Issue #1 but to do them sequentially so it feels like you’re in the 60s reading the comic for first time the same way readers experienced it back then. Marvisney has been dropping facsimile issues of the initial 1961 run of The Fantastic Four this year and it’s been fun fun fun. 

 

 

At first I was giddy and thought ‘Wow, maybe this will be a thing for other titles’, then I realized it’s just a prong on the multi-pronged multi-dimensional marketing approach to get us to get mentally prepared to shell out our hard earned dillies for the 169th new Fantastic Four movie that’s coming out this year. Now I feel unclean and soiled by the Dark Demon of Disney. Some intern just blurted out my idea at a marketing meeting and Bob Iger popped his head out of Satan’s buttocks and wailed ‘I love it!’. Of course what followed after Bob Iger peeking out of Satan’s buttocks was the latest cut of the new Fantastic Four movie and they’re still trying to sanitize Buena Vista Studios and most of Burbank from the stench. Repeat after me Casting Bozos: Pedro Pascal is not Reed Richards.

 

 

I’ve been reading a lot more facsimile issues lately. Seems like the comic book industry has really been upping the amount of facsimiles they release which makes sense since right now in Hollywood the War Cry is 'Just make Another One'. DC has also been releasing a run of Batman facsimiles from its initial 'Hush' from 15 years ago ostensibly to get you hyped about their new Hush run that's started up this year which admittedly looks poopalicious. After dropping money on a bunch of these I’m not so sure that any of them are deeply satisfying reads. I think the legends of comic book publishing were goofing around a lot more and having fun with the medium rather than aspiring to create great literature. 

 

Take the Fantastic Four, in their 2nd issue they convince the Skrulls, an Alien Race prepping to invade our planet, that Earth is overrun by monstrous beings by actually showing them pictures from comic books (Weird Tales and Tales of Suspense). Reed & Co then turn the Skrulls who were left behind on Earth into Cows so they could graze and lead a peaceful rest of their days without being hounded by anyone. I suppose at some point somebody ate a Skrull Burger without knowing? Or maybe a Skrull Kebab? Å Corned Skrull Beef sandwich?

 

 

These enormously oversized Batman reprints which are going for like $13 have been a trip back to the 80s when Bats was Emo, corny and prone to self deprecation and rash maneuvers. It’s an odd experience to thoroughly enjoy something while consistently rolling your eyes at the abundance of silliness. I think it’s safe to say that Modern Comics are way more sophisticated, grounded and properly structured. Where early comic books beat the snot out of the modern books is, for the most part, they didn’t give a fuck. They were throwing whatever came into their brains onto the page, as long as it either made them laugh or giggle with excitement at the novelty of their ideas.

I’m also not sure why I’m being charged more than $4 for any of these facsimiles (except for the oversized ones). What’s the reasoning? You’re just reprinting every single page of the comic, nothing is new! Shouldn’t these be $3 at most?

Meanwhile Marvisney and DC continue to implode and spit out caca. Their  movies are mostly tanking one after the other even after they pour hundreds of millions into them. Nice job with the recent Captain America. Hire a dipshit who says that Captain America really isn’t about America. What’s next? A Spidey who could care less about neighborhoods being friendly? Daredevil, the man with a couple of Phobias?  I think they need to create a D.O.C.E., Department of Comic Efficiency and rip apart the Big 2 to see how they’re spending our hard earned dollars. How much for this new Pooperman? 363 mil? Why? On what??? 225 mil? That's still stoopid expensive. You think Supes saying 'Hey buddy up here’ in the trailer like a Tech Bro is cool? Why does Lex Luthor look like they told AI to make him look like a young Michael Stipe? Why is YoBro-Perman yelling at the Marvelous Miss Maisel? Why isn’t he ordering Chinese Food with her and shopping for technicolor dresses? 

 

Dude, look, you people need to stop with the trash movies and watered down TV shows and put a major chunk of your revenue and budget back into, wait for it - COMIC BOOKS! The wellspring of your entire empire! It's built in IP and they don't care anymore.

And what the hell happened to DSTLRY or as I like to call them Dusty Larry??? I don’t think they’ve released an issue since January! Was their ‘$9 a book for 3 issues’ a big bust? Was it just a drug front for the Cartel? Have the actual CEOs of the company been deported? Seriously, their stuff was the best thing on the racks. Were they even real? Did META or the D.O.D,  target me for psychological torment again ‘Let’s give him some great comics and just turn off the faucet’. Am I in my own Mandela effect?

 

My pull is duhhhh-win-dling, that’s dwindling, as in I’m not buying a lot of comics these days and it’s sad. I bought 7 in May. Sevvv-ennnn. That's ridiculously low, the lowest ever for me. Perhaps that’s why I’ve not posted on here much if at all recently; I’ve been bummed by the state of Comcbookdom. There’s still more than half a year left so I’m praying that some way some how we get some Holy Moly releases or runs but as of today my Best of 2025 doesn’t even have any major new contenders on it yet. Am I just going to be ranking Facsimile Issues? Bottom line, I think having a facsimile issue dropped every now and then was fun but clearly they realize people are buying them and now the market is being flooded with them which takes away the novelty. They're also just being used as marketing tools, if they're about to release a movie, show or dust off an old character expect facsimile issues, blah.

Oy, oh well, there ya go, for the record this is not Ragebait this is CrankyJewBait. Here’s what I actually have been reading for the past several months…

 

 

 

If I was doing a 10 minute Stand-Up Comedy set and for no reason whatsoever at the 5 minute mark without warning, I changed my voice and starting telling jokes with a Russian accent or, I dunno, began imitating Billy Bob Thornton in Sling-blade it would be - weird right? Especially if after a minute I switched back to my normal  voice. That’s what it’s like when you get a new Artist thrown at you in the middle of a story arc with no warning or no reason whatsoever, you’re like, wait, what, which comic did I buy? Is this the - let me find the previous - oh it is. You wanna swap out after an arc, fine. Right smack dab in the middle, it’s annoying and usually it’s disconnected or tangential to the actual story which is what happened to one of the recent Abs Batsy issues. As a stand-alone issue it was great, but dude, like just either finish the arc or take a break and come back when your main artist is ready to keep going. I mean does the artist say, yo I’m hitting Tulum in December with my bae so I’m not gonna be around to draw your Bat-Kira book and does Snyder say ‘Like I give a fuck, I got all kinds of Artist Baes on stand-by boyeee'. Yes, Bruce Wayne looks like Anime Akira in this book so it’s hard to take this too seriously. In my Sling-Blade voice: "But it’s good mmm hmmm, and its Snyder and Bats which is better than that other cockamamie batty stuff so I reckon I’ll a keep a puling it mmm hmmm". 7.8
 

 

 

Another banger from Dusty Larry aka DTSLRY. 'City Beneath Her Feet' was the last Dusty Larry book I purchased before they all fell off a cliff into the abyss into another dimension; this book came out last November. Elsa Charretier is fast becoming one of my fave artists what with her work on Love Everlasting (and what the hell is happening with that, it's been months, jeez). Since Tynion absolutely crushed ‘Spectregraph’ his collab with Christian Ward on the same imprint I thought this was also going to be a Home Run and I was right. These two walloped this story way over the wall, a supremely interesting and perfectly executed ‘grab them and don’t let them go’ first installment to have you clamoring for more. The fact that they just called this the prologue at the end of this issue has me wondering if this might go longer than 3 or 4, that would be fantastic. Dusty Larry can use some long form series and no better place to start than with these two at the helm. Unfortunately it seems the spigot has been turned off for this publisher. I look at this cover and it feels like I'm looking at the dating profile of hot babe who messaged me back once and then hasn't replied since I messaged her back; serious PTSDating Trauma vibes. Puhleez gimme gimme more yum yum books that rate 9.1 or more.

 

 

 

 

Hickman, Dude, what the fuck? Are you going to clone yourself or not? Can they make a HickGPT of you and have your AI Version just write comic books? It’s unbelievable how much better you are than mostly every one. Like, there should be a big button that says ‘HICK ME’ in the center of every main conference room for every comic book publisher. Each month the editors of these publishers should gather in these conference rooms and let a bunch of comic book geeks read the comics they’re about to send to print. Any time one sucks a Comic Geek should just slam the ‘HICK ME’ button which will let the editors know that their comic sucks ballz and needs to be written by AI Hickman. Pull lists will balloon. LCS retailers will experience a boon and the world will be a better place. Ultimate Spidey, my goodness, so fucking good. What an amazing twist with Gwen and Mysterio, just brilliant.  Can you do the Hulk and Moon Knight and, oh, I dunno, take over Saga for a bit and, aw hell just hit HICK ME for the entire industry for a month and see what happens 9.6. 

 

 

 

Oy vey. Why is everyone gushing over this comic? WHY? It’s pee to the oop. Poop. Are we that starved for content and innovative plots that we’ll take some half baked creative writing class idea from High School that’s been sitting in a Trapper Keeper notebook for 30 years and call it genius? Every day a girl wakes up to a new apocalypse, all timelines are at play, they’re all colliding into one another with no rhyme or reason, this chick is bumping into historical characters and remnants of other dimensions and whatnot - dude, ask any actress living in LA what life is like and they'll tell you the same thing: 'Every day is a fucking apocalypse'. This is not thrilling or mind bending or a shattering of conventions. This is lazy writing, shallow character development and messy world building. This is not elevated material, it's pedestrian. You love it, great. I know spectacular when I read it and this ain't it. I can understand being impressed if you were in High School and some quiet mop top haircut art student with serial killer eyes is scribbling these panels in his moleskin notebook during a Period 4 math class. This final panel of issue one is classic 'Death Metal Art Dude with Acne Doodling in Class' vibe:

 

 

 

I’d look over at it and go ‘Wow, that’s dope’, he’d just grunt and shrug in his jean jacket that’s covered with Scorpions and Black Flag patches and go back to scribbling and I'd think 'I bet that guy goes on to make millions. Or maybe he'll go to Visual Arts School and end up like one of Claire's loser Art School Boyfriends in Six Feet Under'. Assorted Crisis Events, is that a euphemism for Los Angeles right now? Because we got some serious crisiseesz and they definitely are assorted. Suck on this concept’s dick for as long as you want but it’s a hard 13 year old boner looking at girls hit volleyballs in High School gym class pass for me 2.5. 

 

 

 

Yadda Yadda Mr. Burns aka The Sovereign keeps losing everything bit by bit yadda yadda, his empire that has existed for centuries is being unraveled by babes who do pilates in primary color spandex. I am all for a protracted story in comics but this felt like it had been dragging a tad for several months. I understand the set-up of the meticulous and strategic take-down of the ‘Sovereign’: taking down all of his assets, strongholds and guardians but it’s been such a drip drip drip downfall that it lacks tension. You’re just reading and saying ‘Wow this guy is getting royally fucked by Dubs all while he's narrating his own demise, sucks for him’; and that was the basic gist. Maybe it would be better if this was put online and you could have AI face swap somebody you can’t stand so you could watch Dubz royally ream them for several months on end; that sounds great. Mr Burns ended up nekkid in front of Dubz and it finally wrapped up in a good but not great way. I expected more from King and more from a 19 issue arc which they pulled like taffy for the last several months. You can tell they felt bad about drawing it out because the issue right after this story ends is a Batman Team Up, “wait don’ go anywhere, we have Bats, Bats is here, hey look, Batman, doing things in this title, hoooooh ha, Bizz to the Izzatz and Dubaroonski, everything is fine, it’s all fine, come back, pretty please 6.7

 

 

I’ve been enjoying the Waid/Samnee Bats & Dickie D series, but you know what? I’m calling BS on Clayface. The whole Clayface story device is bullshit, it’s too convenient. This amorphous brown poop blob can magically, and seamlessly, become any body it wants to. C'mon Dude. Whenever the Brown Poop Blob has been used in any Bat medium I call BS. Why? Ya think that Bats, after having dealt with Poop Dude over and over, wouldn’t have figured out that Poop Dude had a distinctive smell? Okay fine, you can become and look like whomever you want but that doesn’t mean that you can change what you actually are on a molecular level, am I right?  This is just as lazy as 'Oh every timeline is colliding into one and any historical figure is at our fingertips' from above. That said, Samnee's work on Bat's fight scenes and escape at the end of a recent ish was pure gold. As the arc continues and it gets into Crime Boss/Kidnap Robin stuff it does feel a little too much like 66 Batman Bam Biff Pow without the camp. Yet these two are just such great collaborators I’m down to finish up their run even if it means a bit of a yawn here and there. It’s a delightful read and Lord knows this world demands you escape to a delightful read when you get a chance 7.5

I just can’t anymore. I’m done. At this point I think this comic is being used by Marjorie Liu’s therapist as a way to work through her trauma of not being able to properly develop a plot. Her mania has drawn in the great Sana Takeda and reduced her to manic scribblings which at this point looks like a toddler hopped up on Mountain Dew. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is coherent or sensible. I think people are basically just losing their minds these days and that obviously includes comic book writers. The fact that Image, who has slowly turned into an unreadable publisher, enables her lunacy is even more egregious. Like at what point do you as an Editor have to make the visit to the basement where the half naked unkempt wacko scribe and her 37 cats lives to tell her you're pulling the plug. You’ll probably have to bring some cue cards that breaks down the concept of a ‘Finale/Ending to a Story’. Clearly this editor will be in a bulletproof Hazmat suit to deal with the frenetic rage that Liu will unleash on them. Unfortunately, the 11 of us who are left actually reading this disaster have no way of really knowing how to get in touch with each other and if we truly exist. What a shit show. If I had to sum up what this comic has looked like the past several years this panel from their most recent ish would be what I would show someone; just pure arrrrgghhhhh -

 

 

 

This is a mess of a script and a fever dream that has com-puh-leeetly lost it's way and I can't in good conscience continue paying for this self inflicted madness anymore.  Sana Takeda is a brilliant artist and I love supporting concepts like this but there comes a time when you look at the person you're dating who's frothing at the mouth with a lighter near your comic book rack and you realize it's time to move on and cancel your dating app subscription. Speaking of which, I just matched  with someone. I messaged them about their profile with a 'What and a Why?' question, as in what do you etc. and why are you etc. She answered back with a 'Yes'. Clearly she reads Monstress. 10 years, 57 issues and all I got for it was bagged and boarded comic cat litter. 1.0

 

 

 

Well, that's all I got. Actually, no, I have one more, one big Mamma that's sitting right next to my La-Z-Boy that hasn't been popped open yet: the new Heavy Metal; ooh baby baby. Now, I'm not an anthology type guy but this looks special. Yet as everyone in LA knows, 'looks' can stiff you with a $400 dinner bill, plant an eight ball on you and have you in handcuffs in less than an hour so ya never know.

 

Happy Reading...

POWER FANTASY #1 - Review

 

 

I don’t know what social media is anymore. It’s not social, I mean, I rarely if ever see anybody that I’m connected to online; well, at least not in person. Besides that, I’m not sure if it’s technically media. Media is broadly defined as either information or as a way to communicate. I don’t think I’m getting either of that, I’m just getting clips. Clips of shit that, I dunno, might be funny, might be interesting, might make me wonder what they’re like naked, but that’s it. Nobody’s trying to communicate with me or deliver pertinent information. In fact, I would say the entire social media landscape is just a bouillabaisse of randomness designed to inculcate you with ads while shaving years off of your life so that you’re not contributing to the death of a dying planet; at least that’s what the climate cultists would say.

 

Yeah, not a fan, and yet, I probably spend an hour or so on it a day. During my travels through the cyber lands of nonsensical poop I find myself bemused that the algorithm thinks it knows me pretty well by dumping tailored caca in front of my squinting eyes. Well, it did get me recently.  I don’t know why but it began showing me these David Portnoy reels where this Barstool Sports guy, who I’d never heard of before, reviews cheese pizza pies from places all over the country. His signature line is ‘One bite, everybody knows the Rules’. He then gnaws and gnashes at a slice with a couple bites at the top of the slice and one or two at the crust. Clearly this is a direct violation of the ‘One Bite’ slogan since reviews don’t take place after 4 or maybe 5 bites. Sometimes he goes to a second slice, so maybe it's one bite then I go nom nom nom. I wonder if he does this with his dates ‘One piece of clothing off, nothing else, we both know the rules’ and then he proceeds to strip them naked in less than a minute. Anyway, his reviews are brutally honest and he rarely gives anyone over an 8.5.

 

 

 

I now watch these fucking reviews daily. They’re always in my feed. Why do I watch them? I have no idea. Maybe there’s the curiosity about the score, maybe there’s some indirect satisfaction gleaned from watching somebody eat a slice that I’m unable to. Maybe I like guessing the scores. In fact, I’ve seen so many of these reviews that I’ve become eerily accurate in predicting his scores. Once he opens up that pizza box and lifts a slice out I’m like ‘Oh, that’s a 6.8 tops’ or ‘Hmm, that’s got too much of a flop but it’s got a nice under carriage, I bet he goes 8.1 with this’. Yup, that’s my life. Thanks Social Fucking Media!

 

 

I say all of this because the title to this review of this comic book should be called ‘One Page, Everybody Knows the Rules’. It took one page, just one page for me to read and I knew this comic was going to suck donkey scrotum. Why? Look at these two pretentious dipshits eating Pizza outside of a pizza shop in New York. 

 

 

 

Completely unrealistic, this would never happen. The author is clearly not from New York and clearly has no clue about anything in regards to pizza. Maybe he should watch some undercarriages and flops in El Presidente’s reels to get an idea.

 

People don’t buy a single slice from a Pizza shop, walk outside of the Pizza shop, and then stand there without a paper plate or anything and just talk to each other. This is some contrived bullshit. I don’t care if they have superpowers. If they did then they should levitate the slices while they chat, that would be more believable. I mean look at this gorgeous thick thighed Boricua holding her slice walking around:

 

No self respecting bomb ass Latina Babe from the city would everrrr hold a slice like that, and walk around barefoot on the streets like an armpit haired hippie chick from Kansas; holding it in front of her without a bite yet, like it’s a boomerang. You get a slice, it’s put on a plate or on a plate and in a paper bag, you take the fucking thing out, sprinkle cheese and red pepper over it, and bite into it either before or right after you leave the shop. This dude looks like a fucking uptight economics student that just transferred from Harvard or Yale to Fairleigh Dickinson because he was caught up in some sex scandal with a professor. Then these two completely unrealistic characters just walk into the street, there’s no traffic, holding their slices, no flop, like they’re holding a slice in a Domino's commercial where the product placement guy from the Ad Agency is from Iowa.

 

 

 

This such a fucking insult to pizza eaters all over the world. Kieron Gillen, dude, what the fuck. Where are you from? Britain! Now it all makes sense. Look at this guy:

 

 

Yeah, I don’t wanna buy comics from a guy who looks like this. This is a guy who was a Barista when he was in High School and who happily spelled your name wrong on the coffee cup on purpose. He’s the kind of guy who will flick a booger into your latte and then hand it to you with a smile. He’s probably ratting out people for social media posts in England while wandering the streets in Fetish Gear. Dude, stay away from New York. Put these losers in Liverpool or wherever and have them walking around eating Bread Pudding with a pint balanced on their heads.

 

There’s some cockamamie plot about, I dunno, pseudo X-Men posturing against each other. Then there’s this douchebag...

 

 

He’s like the most powerful of them all, yeah right. Look at this fucking guy. He’s one of those crypto assholes who thinks he’s a DJ and spends most of his time in a villa in Ibiza on Molly while banging underage locals. Maybe this is what the author’s ex looked like. I can see that. I can see him trying to get back in his good graces ‘Honey I just made you the baddie in my comic bookie, come back to daddy’s man poon’.

 

Then there’s this whole sequence where the D-Bag DJ kills the President of the United States and everybody in his War Room. Umm, maybe that’s a little too on the nose there KG what with the recent events in the US. Is this what you mean by Power Fantasy? I’m not trying to be political here but whatever mess we have in our country is our fucking mess. If you want to kill a politician, do it in your own backyard otherwise it feels really yucky coming from a sour puss looking bloke like yourself.

 

This reminds me of Mark Millar’s recent series ‘The Ambassadors’ which also wasn’t very good. Similar theme, there’s 6 powerful people all over the world who can change the world, blah blah blah. When you go to Millar’s personal site and click on ‘Comics’ this book is nowhere to be found so he probably thinks it’s as poopy as I do. Generally speaking, if you’re going to introduce heroes or people with extraordinary abilities you better make sure they’re really really strong and developed characters with specific traits. Making them look different doesn’t mean anything. So what? You did some woke casting on the heroes, big whoop. I don’t care what they look like or what they can do or what their preference for smooching is. Are. They. Interesting? The verdict here is, no, no they’re not. If you can’t tell that by the pages before you then, oh well, enjoy an overhyped yawnfest of a book.

 

I will say this: Casper Wijngaard’s art is wonderful to look at and of course Clayton Cowles’ lettering is perfect as always.

 

I’d like to bring back Dave Portnoy’s Pizza Review format for the final punctuation mark on this poop fest. So let’s assume this comic is a slice of pizza. One Issue every body knows the Rules: Flip Flip Flip Flip Toss. Frankie, what the fuck was this? I’m going low Frankie real low. Looks good. No flop on the art or the letter carriage. The plot is a bit doughy. I’m going 5.1

 

 

RATING: 5.1

VERDICT: Drop the Flop