Humble Boom Bundle
Humble Bundle are selling a bunch of ebook comics cheap. Sketch opinions so far:
Bee And Puppycat [*]. Magical temp worker and her cat perform daft assignments. I found it a bit thin.
Bravest Warriors [*]. Cupcake deathmatches, two-headed space kittens, sapient celery, clowns. A small band of cartoon characters save worlds from bizarre threats. Give me more.
Curse. Werewolves and dying children. Excellent artwork but I found the story depressing.
Day Men. Vampires employ humans to do their waking-hours dirty work, and consequently this is mostly about v-on-v feuding. I’d rather watch a few episodes of True Blood.
Dead Letters. A man wakes up with no memory of his past and almost immediately comes under attack. Then things get weird ... he spends the next four episodes learning about the background and odd properties of the world he’s in and playing the violent political game of its inhabitants. I really liked this.
Evil Empire. Slightly unlikely US political thriller with the occasional page revealing bits about the mid-future outcome. I didn’t find this that exciting. I don’t think I’ll buy more.
Hacktivist. Computer security thriller inspired the Arab Spring apparently written by someone who knows annoyingly little about computer security. Improves once it gets over the technobabble, on balance I liked it despite the initial irritation.
Hit. Hardboiled 1940s LA police take to shooting criminals who they can’t bring to justice by legal means, only to find things are dirtier than they look. Good but not quite excellent.
Imagine Agents. MIB types keep children’s imaginary friends under control through high technology and dust-ups. Not bad though fairly predictable.
Lumberjanes [*]. Resourceful girl scouts confront bizarre supernatural threats and earn the occasional badge. Fun, would read more.
Six-Gun Gorilla. A depressed librarian repurposed as a human camera stumbles around a war zone with bizarre physical laws, gradually learning a bit about what’s really going on and starting to affect it, with occasional assistance from the revolver-wielding simian of the title. Interesting and entertaining.
The Midas Flesh [*]. Starts well, with dinosaurs in space, and continues by elaborating the implications of Midas’s wish. Good stuff although I thought the body of the story held up better than the final revelations and conclusion.
(…time passes…)
The Woods. A US high school is mysteriously transported to another world. Some of the children head into the surrounding woods, encountering very hostile and friendly creatures there; the staff and the rest of the children stay in the school, trying to fend off monstrous incursions and rapidly descending into an unpleasant internal power struggle despite their precarious situation. The bundle includes the first three issues (of I don’t know how many). I’m curious what happens next.
Translucid. Nonlinearly told story of a superhero’s struggle, first with his childhood demons and then with his complicatedly motivated nemesis. First three issues of six, feeling a bit undecided about whether I care enough about the characters to buy more.
Suicide Risk. A policeman in a force largely overwhelmed by supervillians himself acquires super powers and starts to fight back. The action is made a bit more interesting by Leo’s initial inexperience and relative weakness and the villains’ numerical superiority, meaning that he has to deploy sneakiness rather than just brute force, though by the end of the second volume he’s overcoming some of these disadvantages. There is also some backstory about the origins of the superpowers and the occasional vignette concerning some individual villain. You could hardly say the concept was original but it does do a good job with it.
Polarity. Bipolar artist discovers that if he stops taking his meds he gains superpowers. Thumpings ensue, plus some discovery of what’s really going on, plus a romantic subplot to motivate the main character a bit. Entertainingly drawn and (at least at the ‘quip’ level) scripted but structurally speaking it didn’t impress.
Fairy Quest. Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf flee the brutal Mister Grimm, who runs Fablewood with an iron fist. Naturally they meet a variety of familiar characters on the way, variously helping or hindering their escape. Another highlight.
Protocol: Orphans. A collection of young secret agent types with a slightly creepy naming scheme fight various kinds of bad guy. Much of the plot is driven by betrayal, unfortunately none of it really surprising enough to raise an eyebrow.
[*] indicates you need to pay $15 or more to get these four. Underline marks what I thought were the real hits.