Thursday, May 21, 2009

Comics Roundup 21/5/2009

Sgt. Fury & His Howling Commandos #1 (of 1), by Jesse Alexander, John Paul Leon, & John E. Workman

This is a somewhat silly comic set in the Second World War, one of those stories where today's writers get to write old-school stories of start characters of yesteryear, in this case this is, you know, Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos. In this story these guys parachute into Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia and basically take on and defeat the entire German army (and a Nazi robot panzer storm trooper), capturing a Japanese submarine while they are at it. It is not quite as much fun as that makes it sound, and frankly this is a lot less entertaining than the Sgt. Rock story of a couple of years ago,but it does have nicely kinetic art, even if the artist seems to think that the Messershmidt Bf 110 has three engines.

The Unwritten #1, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

This is a new Vertigo ongoing title. The main character (one Tom Taylor) is this bloke whose father made a fictionalised version of him the lead character in a highly successful series of fantasy novels (kind of like if J.K. Rowling had a son called Harold, an especially apt analogy given how the fantasy novels here are clearly modelled on her books). Then the title starts suggesting that actually the main character is not actually the (vanished) author's son, but the actual fictional character somehow brought into the real world. Or maybe something else. By the end of it, Tom Taylor is somewhat bemused to find himself the centre of a new world religion, albeit one whose core membership is the kind of saddos who take fantasy novels that bit too seriously.

God only knows where they are going with this, but for the moment it seems like one to watch. Carey and Gross have form as the creators of the Lucifer title, one of those comics that I never read but always thought sounded like a good idea.

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