Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

I recently read through all of Grant Morrison's Invisibles. I've been hearing a lot of good things about it, and the most prolific rumor was that the Wachowski brothers' Matrix movies were more than a little based on it. To the point where Grant Morrison was reportedly watching the first movie and saying "wow, this is a really great movie... wait a minute, this is my comic!" I've read a lot of his stuff before, and I've loved just about everything I've read, from the cybernetically augmented animals of We3, to the unbelievably grand scope of Seven Soldiers. So, I figured, "it's time for the Invisibles!" I gotta say, right from the start, I didn't really understand what was going on. It kind of reminds me of the Illuminatus Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson (highly recommended by the way), where everyone's got their own theory of how reality works, and they all seem equally plausible, but no one seems to really be pro...

Recently DC breathed new life into an oddball comic that debuted in the mid 90s. Xombi was originally a part of the Milestone comics Imprint, which was most notable for being the home of the character Static Shock, based on the ads for other Milestone comics in the issues of Xombi I read, most of the comics under the imprint had pretty poor art, and some ridiculous character concepts. (To be fair, this was the mid 90s, and pretty much every comic was like that). The art in the original run of Xombi is pretty awful, a problem which has been remedied by the work of Frazer Irving. The characters are all simply fabulous though. The opening premise is that David Kim, a researcher into nanotechnology, is mortally wounded by occult creatures trying to steal his work. As a last ditch effort, he injects himself with his nanomachines, which miraculously heal him, while using his close friend and research assistant for raw materials. This puts David in a rare classification of being, a Xombi, a X...

Questions: 1. Do you like alternative history stories where famous people in history create and use devices that are fantastic even by today's standards? 2. Do you like comics that kind of take place in the Marvel universe, maybe in a slightly different reality, but still feature a lot of the characters that you know and love, and thus have the freedom to do different things with those characters? 3. Do you just like head trips? If so, the recent Marvel comic S.H.I.E.L.D. is for you. Just based on the title, you might think this comic has to do with with the agency of the US government, S.H.I.E.L.D., which has a vague area of influence, but basically seems to do whatever the writers at Marvel want it to do. Police superheroes? Check! Combat terrorist networks? Check! Participate in secret wars against extra dimensional threats? Check! Instead, this organization is one that has been secretly protecting Earth from all manner of threats, starting with and ancient Egyptian fighting of...

My first exposure to Mike Carey was through is Felix Castor novel series, but he actually is a more prominent comic author. The Unwritten is the story of Tom Taylor, whose father wrote a best selling children's fantasy series with a main character somewhat inspired by Tom (Think Harry Potter). His father disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and since then, Tom has been doing nothing except getting drunk, and doing the convention circuit, signing books, and giving lectures. Many fans of the series are fixated on him, believing that he really is "Tommy Taylor". Things start getting weird, however, when someone accusing him of never having existed, followed by the very real appearance of a character from the Tommy Taylor book series. Tom knows nothing of any kind of magic, and all he knows is the geography of story telling that his father taught him. He knows where stories were written, and what real world places were used to inspire fictional locales. Here's ...

Ha! I just realized that I had this saved as a draft, and never finished my review. Which makes the title and opening of my review of the movie make no sense. So, it's been awhile since I read this book, but I still think of it fairly often. It's possibly one of the best A-Team style stories I've read or watched. The Losers are a black ops military unit that gets betrayed by a CIA agent known only as Max. They start off just doing a mission for him, and then as they're about to make it out, they get shot down by a missile. After that, things start getting really complicated, completely insane, and kind of fun. I enjoyed the story in the book a lot more than the movie for a couple of reasons. One, Aisha is completely homicidal, and scary, her tone is completely different in the book. Two, there's no silly vibrating egg black hole bombs, just nukes, a lot of them, but still, just nukes. Three is Max, the primary antagonist, what was Max's goal in the movie? Makin...

A good friend of mine got me back into comics a few years ago, and after going to conventions with him and seeing his sketchbook of Punisher drawings by various artists, I started thinking that I might like a character sketchbook as well, but who to pick? I didn't have a favorite character really, I'd been a fan of Deadpool, but as he was on the rise in popularity, there were going to be a lot of sketches of him out there. Then I remembered an old Marvel character from the 90s named Terror. Terror had the unusual ability of being able to graft various limbs onto his body, and gain their memories and abilities. A frequent application of his abilities was to take the ear and the eye of someone who was recently deceased, which would grant him the ability to see and hear the person's memories. Additionally he could use the hands of a locksmith to gain the ability to pick locks, or a helicopter pilot, and so on. His gimmick was interesting, but even better for the purpose...

Right off the bat, I'm going to say that Y is the saddest story I have ever taken in, with an emotional punch like a locomotive (or a bomb if you will). No work of fiction has ever destroyed me emotionally like this has. That being said, the story may be a tragedy, but gettin there was a lot of fun. The story starts off with every male mammal on the face of the Earth being almost simultaneously wiped out by some kind of illness. With the exception of English major/escape artist Yorick Brown, and Ampersand, a capuchin monkey that he's volunteered to train to help people with disabilities. There's no apparent reason as to why they survived, they just did. At the time the plague hit, Yorick's girlfriend, whom he was about to propose to, was on a trip in Australia, while he was in Chicago. Naturally he sets out to find his true love. Along the way he picks up the companions 355, an agent of a secret government organization called the Culper Ring, and Dr. Allison Man...

Powers is an odd comic. In a world filled with parodies of classic DC and Marvel super heroes, Powers is just about a pair of homicide detectives that have to deal with it, and do their jobs. Specifically, they're the officers that get assigned all of the Powers related homicide cases. In a world full of people that are bullet proof, can walk through walls, or kill with their thoughts, these two try and figure out who did the killing, and then go out with nothing more than their sidearms in order to make an arrest. It's a fairly ridiculous concept really, on their side, the police simply have "drainers" installed in all of their cells and interrogation rooms, which are able to dampen the abilities of powers. Out in the field though, there's nothing these guys can do to half the people they're fighting, they're reliant on superheroes to take down any supervillains that are resisting arrest. Really, actually bringing the perpetrators is rarely the focu...

I make no apologies about my disinterest in following any ongoing comic series, or for any of the huge crossover stories that either of the Big Two (Marvel and DC) put out, but I'd been hearing that Marvel's really been rocking their cosmic characters lately, and it's just been awesome. As a little background here, for anyone who knows even less about this stuff than I do, cosmic is the general term used to refer to any extraterrestrial titles in comics. In Marvel this means that we're talking about characters like Galactus, the devourer of worlds, his heralds, most famously the Silver Surfer, Thanos and the Titans, Adam Warlock and the other former members of the Infinity Watch, Celestials, the Beyonder, the Living Tribunal, really the list goes on quite far. From what I can gather, most of the cosmic properties had been retired for the last couple of years, and Annihilation served as a relaunch, so there's no ongoing books to read and get into, and all of the...

I've been on a pretty big Warren Ellis kick lately, and I think that this might be the most unsettling book that he's done. The violence here is brutal and disgusting, as are all of the characters. By the time you're done reading this book, you'll be hard pressed to find a character you can sympathize with. The premise is that in the 60's a group of super beings shows up, calling themselves the Levellers, they fight injustice wherever they see it, their leader, who never dirties his own hands, gives the line that they do not intend to rule, but simply allow everyone to live their own lives as they see fit. The Levellers are all normal people that have been exposed to a drug that is a derivative of a psychoactive, which then grants them different powers, although by standard they are all very hard to kill. Throughout the years, the Levellers become the Front Line, and they have a revolving roster as members retire or are killed in action. The story kicks off...

Okay, time to come out of my post Christmas hibernation. So, we'll kick things off with the comic that I finished on Christmas Eve: I'll be honest, I find it very difficult to get into a lot of the mainstream comics, I read just about nothing that takes place in either the main Marvel or DC universes. The amount of backstory that one must swallow down to get into the character is almost as staggering as the constant crossover events. Deadpool seems to be the exception, I think the reason behind that is that he's just so over the top silly that it allows him to poke fun at all of the ridiculous meth addicted soap opera crap that's going on in the world. Enough griping about comics in general, we're here to talk about Seven Soldiers. Seven Soldiers is an epic storyline by Grant Morrison about a race called that come to Earth during the height of each civilization, and then wipe out the human race to the point of a few thousand people living in mud huts. It se...

So, if you've been following, I watched the original BBC Prisoner series from the 60's, and absolutely loved it, although I was quite confused and overwhelmed by the ending. Then I watched the 2009 AMC remake, and I was bored to tears. What's a guy in the market for a little more Prisoner action to do? Track down a copy of the Prisoner comic mini-series that was published by DC in the late 80's. Shattered Visage takes place 20 years after the ending of the Prisoner, it offers up a more definitive interpretation of the events in the last episode of the series, as well as a new story involving the island, that still manages to capture the feel of the original series. In other words: It's good! The story deals with number Six, who has been alone on the island since it was evacuated 20 years ago. The interpretation of the final episode is that when Number Six assumed the role of Number 1, it finally broke him down, due to his conviction that he was not any number. ...

Those are words that you'll read over and over again in Warren Ellis's Global Frequency comic. It's about a privately owned and funded organization with agents all over the world with every skill set you might conceivably need, all united for the single purpose of saving the world. Every issue is a more or less unconnected story, with only two characters being consistently in each book. Miranda Zero is the head of th GF, and Aleph is the punk girl that monitors the frequency and runs all of their communications. Basically, there are enough people on the Frequency, with enough access and knowledge, that they can keep an eye on most of the world for bad things about to happen. When they come across something, they tap field agents with the necessary skills, and get them all together in order to neutralize the threat. The first issue deals with a Russian sleeper agent left over from the cold war, with an implat in his head that will teleport a nuclear bomb directly on...