THE VESSEL OF TERROR by Magnus Aspli, Dave Acosta, Jeremy P Roberts, Goran Kostadinoski and Alex De-Gruchy
Markosia, paperback, £12.99

Reviewed by Matthew Johns

The Vessel of Terror is a graphic novel in the style of HP Lovecraft, which tells of a whale research ship that discovers and captures a mysterious Magnapinna squid. The first of these squid ever to be captured, it is examined closely by members of the crew, while the superstitious captain wants it to be thrown back overboard.

Beautifully inked and well written, the tale flicks back and forth between the ship and its crew, and a doctor facing the black death in 1349. As members of the crew succumb to fear, possession and madness, in 1349, Doctor Virchow watches helplessly as his village gradually dies from the plague.

The artwork effectively portrays the confusion and fear of the protagonists, and the Lovecraftian tale captures the imagination well. An enjoyable read, well worth picking up if you have the opportunity.

BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY by Paul Dini, Carlos D’Anda and various, DC/ Titan, h/b, £16.99

Reviewed by Jay Eales

From the man behind some of the very best Batman animated stories, Paul Dini, comes the lead-in to one of the biggest computer games of the year: Batman: Arkham City.  Dini has to walk a similar path to Jeph Loeb with his various Batman miniseries projects, and find a way to incorporate all the heavy hitters of the Batman rogues gallery. That he does this in a way that manages to remain fresh is testament to his skill.

Artwise, Carlos D’Anda puts in a workmanlike job, with occasional high points. There’s nothing to particularly dislike about his work, but there are plenty of artists I’d rather see here, such as Ted Naifeh, who illustrates one of several short related pieces at the end of the book.

The only real problem is that it relies on the reader being familiar with the previous Arkham game, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and its job is to move the pieces around to set up the new Arkham City game, so it was always doomed to be the middle bit of a sandwich. Although I don’t know about you, but my favourite bit is the filling. I don’t have a games console capable of playing the Arkham games, so this is the only bite of the sandwich I have to go on.

Storywise, it takes up in the aftermath of Arkham Asylum, where an augmented version of Bane’s venom was used to power up a bunch of other Bat-villains, who run riot. Now, the Asylum’s Chief Warden becomes Gotham’s Mayor, and instigates a new rehabilitation programme where certain sections of Gotham are walled off, Escape from New York style, and criminals are thrown over the wall to fight for supremacy. Sounds like an insane plan? Certainly, but there’s a power behind the throne, and the Mayor is being manipulated by another of Batman’s foes, for reasons that won’t be made clear until the finale in the Arkham City game.

Prelude to Arkham City does exactly what it sets out to do, which is to explain how you get from A to B in a breezy entertaining manner, whetting the appetite for the feast to come. But that’s all there is to it. For fans of the games, that’s mission accomplished. If you’ve no intention of buying the games, you’ll feel as though you’ve had the prawn cocktail and gone home while everyone else tucks into the main course.

ONE MODEL NATION by Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Jim Rugg, Titan Books, h/b, £16.99

Reviewed by Jay Eales

Well, I’m sorry to say that I didn’t like that at all. A heavily fictionalised biography of a Kraftwerk-inspired German electro-pop/rock band during the height of Krautrock, against a backdrop of the Baader-Meinhof Gang’s terrorist activities. Definitely a promising and original scenario, and one I was interested in exploring. It’s an era I have some fondness for, but one I’ve always been meaning to investigate in more depth, so I was hoping that One Model Nation would fill in some of those blanks for me. Unfortunately, the script by Courtney Taylor-Taylor, better known as the lead singer of the Dandy Warhols, takes a lot of liberties with the facts in order to bolster the fiction, but doesn’t serve either well. I found the whole thing muddied and inconsistent, with the characterisation of the band members other than Sebastian as uniform as their stage costumes. I don’t have any clear idea as to what sort of band One Model Nation are. There’s the synthesisers and neat uniformity of Kraftwerk, but coupled with ponytails and shaggy hair, and a frontman who screams and throws himself around like a Damo Suzuki or Iggy Pop. Comics are already at a distinct disadvantage when depicting the music scene, but I have no idea what they sound like, even in my head. In a couple of scenes, just before gigs, they discuss whether one band member or another will show up, but there is not even a hint of panic that they won’t be able to go on with the show, so interchangeable are they! On one hand, Taylor-Taylor is to be applauded for not just trotting out the old tropes of a band biography, but in telling me his truth, I think he skipped a few too many details in the telling.

Taylor-Taylor seems in a rush to leap from event to event, skirting so lightly over everything that I did not feel the importance of anything that was going on, apart from a couple of stand-out scenes. One Model Nation appear on Top of the Pops, and are ushered into the presence of David Bowie, whose likeness is depicted by artist Jim Rugg as though channelling Madman and iZombie artist Mike Allred, who coincidentally wrote the foreword to the book. The other scene which stayed with me was the fictionalised escape of Baader.

This Titan Books edition is a revised new edition of a book previously published by Image. Tayor-Taylor has taken the opportunity to revise some parts of the strip, and there is a fair amount of back matter where he describes the genesis of the project, and we see cover designs, thumbnails and pages from Jim Rugg’s sketchbook. I have to say that I found more power in Rugg’s sketches than in many of the finished pages, but some of that may be down to the odd reproduction, with colouring that gives the impression that it has been photocopied a few times before going to print. This may have been a deliberate choice, to reflect the lo-fi retro zines of the period it depicts, but that may just be me reading too much into things. In the background notes, Taylor-Taylor says that the Image edition also featured a prologue and epilogue by another artist, which does not appear in this version. I wonder whether those scenes would have given me a better grip on the narrative.

Overall, I think that One Model Nation is an example of a celebrity from another medium whose talents do not translate well to comics. Compare and contrast with A Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way, with his Umbrella Academy series, for someone who, arguably, turns out to be a better writer than rock star.

CROSSED: Volume 1 by Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows, Avatar Press/Titan Books, p/b, £18.99

Reviewed by Jay Eales

You can get a pretty good idea as to whether or not Crossed is for you by mulling over the following question: Do you want to read a comic where the antagonists think nothing of lopping off one of your legs and fucking it? If the answer comes back as no, then you’re best to move along now. Nothing to see here for you.

There’s a real 28 Days Later/The Walking Dead vibe here, with Ennis cranking his sickest ideas up to at least eleven, maybe twelve, and published by Avatar, possibly the only high profile American publisher who would consider publishing it. The concept is simple enough: A band of ordinary folks band together after some unknown event happens, causing some folks to become ‘Crossed’, recognisable by an angry red skin condition, looking as though someone has burned a cross across their faces. That, and the sheer insanity on display, tends to give them away.

As Ennis makes clear, the Crossed, for all their blasphemously inventive atrocities, don’t do anything that humans have never thought to do before, without the excuse of some imaginary zombie virus. They’re just the worst of us. And unlike the infected from 28 Days Later, who are rage personified, or your common or garden Romero zombie, semi-braindead but relentless, the Crossed are a varied bunch. Delayed gratification is not something that occurs to any of them. In fact, if they can’t find any normal people to play with, they’re just as likely to attack each other. Hmm… Crossed may just be an exploration of the mindset of the EDL… What makes them particularly dangerous is the way that some are sneaky, and able to plan some outrageous vileness upon our band of intrepid survivors. And then, some of them like nothing more than to beat you with a horse’s cock. As survivalist horror goes, there’s not much bleaker, and yet, Ennis leavens it with some of the trademark gallows humour that used to punctuate his Punisher and Preacher stories. You’ve met The Russian and Arseface. Prepare to meet Horsecock!

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, CENTURY: 1969 by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. Knockabout Comics/ Top Shelf Productions £7.99

Reviewed by Mike Chinn

Moore brings his saga of a re-imagined 20^th century into the Swinging Sixties. Mina, Allan and Orlando (now going by the much hipper Lando) are dropped off at Dover by the Nautilus and arrive in a psychedelic London populated by more 60s icons than you can shake a bong at. The Saint, James Bond, Thunderbirds, Adam Adamant, Callan, Steptoe & Son… The Deep Fix is playing at the very club where The Rutles had their first gig; just round the corner there’s a certain Jerry Cornelius (The Cure for Cancer incarnation: white hair, black skin and teeth, panda skin coat); in Hyde Park there’s going to be a free open air concert fronted by the Purple Orchestra.

The plot’s pretty slight, once again centring on the pursuit of a certain Crowleyesque magician who has gone by many names over the decades – Carswell, Mocato, Haddo – but it’s the ride that matters. O’Neill’s artwork is complex but stark, filled with cameos and jokes – this is one comic where each panel rewards close scrutiny. Even before Mina goes off on a bad trip there’s a vaguely nightmarish aspect that the garish, neon-lit capital can’t outshine.

Roll on the next instalment.

BATMAN: HUSH UNWRAPPED by Jeph Loeb & Jim Lee. DC/Titan £29.99

Reviewed by Jay Eales

A deluxe reissue of the 2002 collaboration between Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee, emphasising the artistic side of the partnership. Storywise, it’s very much in the same mould as Loeb’s earlier volumes with Tim Sale: The Long Halloween and Dark Victory. The formula is that of a mystery, conveniently bringing Batman into conflict with most of his rogues gallery. In this case, the character pulling the strings calls himself Hush. A new foe… or is it? Even though Hush is nearly a decade old, I won’t spoil the reveal, as without it, the story would be robbed of its raison d’être.

Why bring out this version? Someone discovered Jim Lee’s original pencil art for the series, and had the idea of putting out a collection stripped of both inks and colouring, to show off Lee’s tight pencil art. So that it can still be read as a comic, they retain Richard Starkings’ lettering, but to be honest, the colour text boxes and special effects look garish on top of line art.

If you want to read Hush, I’d recommend one of the more traditional editions. This one is strictly for the Jim Lee fans, or wannabe artists who can learn from looking at pencil originals, and compare against the finished pages. An oddity rather than an essential purchase.

GIRL GENIUS, OMNIBUS VOLUME 1: AGATHA AWAKENS by Phil & Kaja Foglio, Tor, h/b, £24.99.

Reviewed by Selina Lock

Agatha Clay is a lab assistant at Transylvania Polygnostic University, but dreams of being a top scientist and is brimming with ideas for new machines. Unfortunately none of her ideas work and her luck takes a turn for the worse when she’s mugged and her mentor is blown-up. Through a series of mishaps she finds herself in Airship City under the rule of the megalomaniac Baron Wulfenbach, and working alongside his son Gilgamesh.

Girl Genius gives us mad scientists, talking cats, dashing gentlemen, budding romances, Jaeger Monsters, heads in jars, robots and a feisty heroine with a hidden past. It’s an interesting take on a steampunk world, as it’s set during the industrial revolution, but one where only inventors with the Spark can make working machines and the Spark tends to send them mad. There is a huge streak of humour running through the book, but underneath lie dark themes and violence giving it more depth.

The artwork tends towards the cartoony, but is wonderfully detailed and bursting with an energy that reflects the characters and the plot. The machine designs and the double-page spread (on page 116) of Airship City will certainly appeal to those who like the steampunk aesthetic.

I was surprised by the bright colour scheme when flicking through the book, but it soon became clear that the colours reflected Agatha’s development through the book. Starting out with a traditionally bronze steampunk palette with flashes of colour when Agatha shows signs of the Spark, it morphs into bright colours when her powers come to the fore. Flashbacks and stories within the main plot use appropriate colour schemes.

My main criticism would be that the Jaeger Monster dialect pulled me out of the story until I got the hang of how they were pronouncing words.

Overall, Girl Genius is a fun, fast paced story, now presented in a lovely hardback omnibus edition, demonstrating why the series has won several Hugo Awards.

The full list of nominees for the 2012 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards has been announced. Named after acclaimed comics creator Will Eisner, the awards are in their 24th year of highlighting the best publications and creators in comics and graphic novels.

Mike Carey‘s The Unwritten has received two nominations in the categories Best Writer and Best Single Issue.

Voting will take place over a total of 27 categories, and ballots will be going out in mid-April to comics creators, editors, publishers, and retailers. The results in all categories will be announced in a gala awards ceremony on the evening of Friday 13 July 2012 at Comic-Con International, San Diego, USA.

The BBC have reported that French comics artist, Jean Giraud – better known by his alias, Moebius – has died aged 73 after a battle with cancer.

As well as in his homeland and across Europe, Giraud was popular in the US and Japan, having worked alongside Stan Lee and several manga artists amongst others. He helped launch, and contributed to, Metal Hurlant (and, later, its English language version Heavy Metal) in the 1970s, creating characters such as Arzach, the silent figure who glides above alien canyons astride a giant bird.

Giraud won many admirers in the film world too, and contributed designs to films such as Alien, Tron, Willow, Masters of the Universe, The Abyss and The Fifth Element.

IDW Publishing will make history when it teams up the Doctor with the crew of the USS Enterprise in comic book format for the first time in Star Trek: The Next Generation / Doctor Who: Assimilation 2.

Launching in May 2012, the comic will feature the Borg and the Cybermen as they create an unholy alliance resulting in potential disaster for all humanity. Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise find themselves joining forces with the Doctor and his companions, with the fate of the galaxy hanging in the balance.

The eight-issue series will be written by Scott and David Tipton, the authors of critically acclaimed Star Trek: Infestation, with a helping hand from longtime Doctor Who writer Tony Lee, and will feature fully painted artwork by J.K. Woodward (Fallen Angel).

Doctor Who and Star Trek are two hugely successful franchises that began as television series, and have expanded into a number of other media. Nearly five decades and 1,500 episodes in the making, this is the moment that both Trekkers and Whovians have been waiting for!

Full information from IDW Publishing HERE