Comic Book Review: Week 12/10/2014

Shutter #7 by Joe Keatinge (Writer), Leila Del Duca (Artist), Owen Gieni (Colorist), John Workman (Letterer), Frank Cho (Variant Cover), Ray Fawkes (Variant Cover), John Workman (Variant Cover)

It feels like I’ve been looking forward to this issue forever! After #6, Shutter took a short hiatus between arcs and the trade paperback collecting #1-6 (Shutter Volume 1: Wanderlost
) came out last month. So I read through my copy to refresh myself on the story (I was surprised how many little things I missed!) and dug into #7 eagerly.

Minor spoilers ahead! Shutter is a story about exploration and adventure in a setting best described as urban fantasy, there are talking bi-pedal animals, talking not-animals, ninja ghosts, sentient machines, weapons of mass and minor destruction, basically if you can put it to words it can very likely appear in the pages of Shutter (probably even things you can’t put into words…). In this zany world Kate Kristopher and her father were famous adventurers until his untimely demise. Since then Kate has retired and become a photographer, and Shutter #1 kicks off with her being forced out of retirement by the earth shattering revelation that she has siblings that her father never told her about! 5 issues later we’ve met some of these siblings and Kate has gone through a re-origin kind of story that rekindles her adventuring career, whether she wants to return to it or not! I should mention now that Shutter is at times all kinds of whimsical, but it is also at sudden moments very dark and terrifying! If you like Saga, do yourself a favor and check out this book, the artistic “anything can exist” approach to a fanstasty/sci-fi setting and exploration elements are very similar.

Oh if you’re new to Shutter and just read the trade paperback, I also recommend buying Shutter in single issues, after the comic there’s usually a short bonus guest comic and the letters column has an awesome culture of recommending books, comics, movies, music and any other thing you might be engaged with. I enjoy this in particular because I find when looking for recommendations regarding comics it’s hard to find stuff outside of the big name publishers in America and to some extent the UK, other countries make some interesting comics too! This material isn’t in the trade paperback edition so if you’re interested, go read #7!

Hexed #5 by Michael Alan Nelson (Writer), Dan Mora (Artist) Alice X Zhang (Variant Cover)

Hexed is awesome because it’s a story about a thief who uses magic and artifacts to steal other magical things. She is also cursed (thus the title) to a preordained and somewhat vaguely menacing fate after her death. Hexed is brilliant because it has top notch art that tells a compelling story of three women who are thrown together encountering magical adventures and dangers and somehow feel like a family (no matter how much they might say they hate each other), not unlike the Fantastic Four. The first arc concluded with an awesome painting hopping battle during a gallery show. This book does a great job keeping plot points close to its chest but dropping enough hints to entice you. There’s a lot to be explored in the past of all the characters too that I wouldn’t mind seeing!

Batgirl #37 by Brenden Fletcher (Wrtier), Cameron Stewart (Writer), Babs Tarr (Artist), Maris Wicks (Colorist), Jared K. Fletcher (Letterer),  Bengal (Cover Artist), Darwyn Cooke (Cover Artist)

There was more social media and young-people-in-not-Brooklyn-setting crime in this issue, which left me a little turned off back in #35 but I found this particular story really enjoyable.  The previous issue, #36, was probably one of my favorite single issues of the whole year. Babs Tarr is doing fantastic with the art and you can tell that the writers have a lot of affection for Barbara Gordon and bringing her most fun and relate-able side to the fore while demonstrating her intelligence and skills that make her a force to be reckoned with. Like Gotham Academy the few reservations I had after reading their respective #1’s have been dispelled so I’ll be reading these books for quite some time.

EDIT: Since this post I have read other reactions to Batgirl #37 that have really changed my thoughts on it and brought the story’s transphobic nature to my attention, read my full thoughts in this post.

Bitch Planet #1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick (Writer), Valentine De Landro (Artist and Cover Artist), Chris Peter (Colorist), Clayton Cowles (Letterer)

I didn’t really know what to expect going in, but I’m glad I took the plunge because this is a really interesting comic. The setting is a dystopian future where women who are not compliant with behavior, or physical, expectations are shipped off to a prison planet. The meta-thing that’s interesting about this book is that its setting is a commentary on the oppression of women in society today! It’s a comic that’s meant to challenge you, to compel you to ask yourself questions about the expectations of women by men, the media, and even by other women in the world that we live in. After I finished reading the comic I finally did some actual research on the buzz around this book and I’ll leave further comments on the comic’s background and message to the writer, Kelly Sue DeConnick, who can speak about it far more eloquently. This issue came with a short essay: “‘But I’m not oppressed.’ This is the only thing I heard more than ‘Does feminism even matter anymore?’ when I taught gender studies at a large Midwestern college” by Danielle Henderson, which was an interesting read.

If you enjoyed Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
you’ll find similar themes of gender based exploitation in a dystopian future.  The setup is reminiscent of Orange is the New Black although not having watched the show I can’t speak to their similarities. This #1 is a thought provoking read on top of being full of action and drama. It is also the start of a very meaningful social commentary if it continues to deliver as strongly in the future. As of right now I’m looking forward to the next issue. So go read it!