Lone Star Press

Denis Leary and Peter Tolan return to making Leary seem like the biggest jerk in the world in what could be seen as a sequel to thier cancelled series The Job. Leary is a NY fire fighter who sees dead people including his cousin who died on 9/11. There’s not really a lot of people to root for on the show until Diane Farr shows up toward the end of the first season. The cast is full of dark and twisted characters, but anything that gets Lenny Clarke back on TV is okay by me.

  

Matt Fractions take on the Punisher in New York gunning down idiots like the Stilt-Man is way overdue. This issue also makes sense of a plot point from the latest issue of Civil War. Ariel Olivetti pencils and ink washes the issue with color by Dean White for a nice look. Punisher relaunches seem to come every few years and this fills the niche not served by the current dark bloody Punisher material. Fractions dark comic version is a Punisher series for the rest of us.

  

I am a fan of the classic pulp heroes like the Lone Ranger and Tarzan and Doc Savage. That said, this book is a Zorro book for women. Don Diego de la Vega and his milk brother Bernardo have a mystical telepathic connection. Everyone gets exactly what they deserve, poetically if possible. The book starts with Zorros shaman of a Grandmother and inches forward. In true Robert Campbell fashion, spirit quest slash Zorro myth goes on in excruciating detail. Little Diego de la Vega sees his spirit familiar, the fox, and on and on and on.

Over half way through the book, the actual Zorro business gets started and that proceeds pretty well. The prose is pretty engaging, but the style creates a distance from the reader because the story is told in an overview. Without getting in close on the characters and having a sense that the events are happening in real time, the story loses its immediacy and its suspense. Running 15 hours over 13 CDs, this is an interesting study of a classic character but a bit long and a bit syrupy.

  

I have not always been a big Brian K Vaughan fan, but Runaways is a great comic book. The High Concept has a half-dozen kids finding out that their parents are Super-villains. When the kids see their folks kill someone as a part of a sacrifice, they freak and hit the street. So, the kids are on the run from their parents and the corrupt officials on their payroll. The art is slick and there are a couple of twists and turns. The eighteen issues go by really quickly.  First class work.

  

I had taken a break from saying nice things about Bill Willinghams work, because I was starting to repeat myself like a broken record. And Bill and I are friends. That said, FABLES is one of the best contemporary comics on the market. I have long thought that FABLES will outshine SANDMAN over the long haul because Bill is managing to keep a thoughtfully energized quality in his work that slipped in the last of Gaimans run.

This graphic novel tells some of the backstory of the more popular fabletown residents like Snow White, Bigby Wolf, Frau Totenkinder and old King Cole. The stories are charming and heartbreaking and funny and tragic and the book is far too short.

  

Michael Scott and his pals are back for more in the 22 episodes that make up the Second Season of this fresh spin on the classic BBC series. Steve Carell is perfect as the unbearably dense manager, Michael Scott. The ensemble cast takes shape in this season as they make the best of the stupidity of the paper business. Outstanding episodes include the Boys and Girls episode where Michael has to retaliate when the girls get a Women in the Workplace seminar. Every episode comes with a few minutes of hilarious deleted scenes that had to have been cut for time. There are a few extras for the DVD that round out the whole package.

Someone wandering into my house while I was watching this show might have confused me with a mental patient. I was laughing hysterically and slapping my knee, imagine my surprise, I am a knee-slapper. The Office is an example of the critics getting it right and the audience getting it wrong. After watching this DVD set, I am a regular Office viewer.

  

This is an example of compressed storytelling at its best. Within a couple of issues, we learn that young Jonah Hex had an abusive alcoholic Father who was a moonshiner who sold Jonah to the Apache along with the corn squeezins. Jonah then saved the leader of the tribe from a mountain lion and became blood brothers with the chiefs spineless son, Noh-Tante. Jonah is double-crossed in the challenge to become a warrior and gets separated from the tribe. He taks a mortal wound, recovers from that and became a scout. Next, he fights in the Civil War (the first one) and becomes a bounty hunter and has a fight with his blood brother and gets his scar. All of this is done in two issues. All of this is told in flashback as he searched for an abducted woman and fights off a French bounty hunter. As you might guess, the script by Michael Fleischer moves along and Ernie Chan gives the Old West a gritty realism. Brilliant stuff. Oh and there were SPOILERS on this pair of thirty year old comics.

Older comics also give a glance back into the past as they are filled with ads for John Travolta and Farrah Fawcett-Majors posters. Four dollars would get you a years worth of Action Comics or Weird War Tales. The pricier stuff like Worlds Finest or House of Mystery would set you back a whopping Six fifty. Crossman was selling an indoor BB-Gun range. (Perfect for kids with depth perception.) Of course, Sea-Monkeys were only a buck. Old comics are like a wonderfully smelly time- machine.