Welcome True Believers, it’s your ol’ pal Johnny here with another installment of WE GOT ISSUES Cinepunx’s monthly comic round-up! I am currently in the midst of writing my yearly Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide market report so I only had time to write about a few new books that I’m jazzed about this month but rest assured I will have more comics to talk about with all you fabulous freaks next month! Excelsior!
Motor Girl #1 (2016) Abstract Studios, Terry Moore
From the person who brought us Strangers in Paradise, Echo, and more recently Rachel Rising, comes Motor Girl, Terry Moore’s newest project. Well, maybe not SO new — Moore had plans to launch Motor Girl after SiP ended back in 2007. But, as he said, “the universe wanted me to make Echo, instead.” So I guess the “universe” also coerced Moore into making Rachel Rising as well, and now, as the universe wills, it is finally time for Moore to explore the intricate world of Motor Girl.
If you are already familiar with Moore’s work then you pretty much know what to expect, if not, then boy are you in for a treat! What Terry Moore does better than most is deliver an incredibly intimate story, focusing tons attention on the characters. His stories are always well paced and drawn with expert care, with beautiful backgrounds and great detail in facial expressions and body language. You will not find any narrative text boxes explaining how anyone feels, Moore just lets the characters live and breathe on the page.
In Motor Girl’s first issue, we already get enough information about the cast and surroundings to be immediately charmed. After a U.F.O. crash lands in Sam’s junkyard in the middle of the night, she and her 500 pound gorilla friend, Mike, investigate the scene. Despite never before seeing a U.F.O., Sam & Mike effortlessly figure out what is wrong and fix it — much to the astonishment of the cute little alien crewmen. Once word gets out, who knows what this could do for business? Someone did make an offer on the junkyard earlier that day, but that’s probably just a coincidence. Right? Terry Moore always rewards his readers with flawless art and masterful storytelling, so picking up issue #1 is a pretty good idea right now while they are still available!
Ether #1 by Matt Kindt and David Rubín from Dark Horse Comics
Earthborn scientist-adventurer Boone Dias has made quite a name for himself in Agartha, the capital city of the Ether, a mystical madcap whimsical world existing somewhere outside of our own dimension. In the Ether, magic rules without question but questioning is exactly what Boone Dias does. Dias is a man of facts and numbers and has taken it upon himself to explore and explain the unknown, and in doing so in his travels to the extradimensional Ether, he has solved quite a few mysteries. So many that word of his unparalleled deductive reasoning has reached the Mayor of Agartha. It seems an impossible and dreadful crime has been committed and Dias is the only person who has the capacity to solve it.
Interestingly, Matt Kindt stated in a press release provided by Dark Horse that he has a “love-hate” relationship with the supernatural and that the genre itself doesn’t really interest him much as a creator. Ether will explore the reasons why he feels this way, and it would seem that Kindt has created and enlisted Boone Dias to get to the bottom of it. Artist David Rubín really lays down some seriously wonderful art in this book. Nice layouts, a vibrant color pallete, interesting world and character designs, and even his lettering is fantastic! Ether will be a 5 issue mini-series. The first issue is out now and the second comes out late December, so still time to join the fun!
9 MILLION A YEAR DEAD. WE MUST ALL COMPLY WITH THE ANTIBIOTIC
PRESERVATION ACT. RATIONING IS RATIONAL.-The Lionheart Party
MAKE BRITAIN STRONG AGAIN.
The year is 2036 — the not too distant future, mind you — and thanks to the previous generations’ negligence in research and discovery of new antibiotics, bacteria has won. For decades, pharmaceutical companies and governments agreed that investing in new antibiotics was unprofitable and so the resistance grew. Welcome to the Antibiotic Apocalypse. No longer do the old solutions work, and it will take time to discover new ones. So now we must ration our medicine, only giving it those with high PCI (Productivity Contribution Index) scores. Why should the government decide who gets treatment or not, who lives and who dies? How is one life more or less valuable than another? Instead of blaming the past how can we unite and find a solution that is fair and human for all? These are the questions that writer Sara Kenney, artist John Watkiss, and the rest of the Surgeon X team will ask and explore.
Our main protagonist is one Rosa Scott, an ace surgeon, who, with the assistance of her brilliant yet unstable brother, Lewis, takes it upon herself to treat those who have been abandoned by the system and can’t get help anywhere else. In an effort to save as many people as possible, she opts to turn down patients who qualify to get treatment elsewhere or to those who are too far gone for it to do them any good. Fair enough, right? Interestingly though Rosa will also refuse treatment to those she deems unworthy of her help, people who are “part of the problem”, greedy, selfish, harmful people who don’t deserve to live. What does it mean to believe in the Hippocratic Oath but also believe that life has become a privilege and not a right?
Sara Kenney started off in a career in science but traded it in to work in TV, film, and animation. Surgeon X is actually Kenney’s first time writing a comic book and after reading it you would never know! Kenney delivers a well paced, moody story with excellent world building without overwhelming the reader with straight information and her cast of characters feel real and are already well established by the end of the first issue. John Watkiss and James Devlin, are a perfect art team for this book, with Watkiss on pencils and inks and Devlin on colors. Watkiss and Devlin do a fantastic job matching the tone of the story and settings whether it’s the cold sterile hospitals or the warm yet dark London terrain reflecting the heated conflict consuming the city. All of this pulled together by superstar Editor Karen Berger, best known for her key role in founding DC Comics’ imprint Vertigo in 1993. Under Berger, Vertigo brought comics such as Sandman, Preacher, V for Vendetta, Y: the Last Man, Transmetropolitan, iZombie, and Hellblazer to name a few to the world during her 20 year career at DC Comics until she left in 2013. Surgeon X is her first project since returning to the comics field. Surgeon X issue #3 comes out today so still time to catch up!
