James Stokoe’s Aliens: Dead Orbit sees a sizable vessel discover an unresponsive ship floating in the depths of space. As we’ve seen in prior Aliens books, the active crew decides to board the ghost ship and see if they can’t find any survivors. And they do, but the discovery is essentially made in vain, as an electronic mishap leaves three survivors burning inside their sleep pods. Unfortunately for our would-be heroes, an alien lifeform is quickly discovered, and as the first issue comes to a cliffhanger halt, these nasties lifeforms make their presence known in bloody fashion.
If you’re looking for a book to drive you into the deeper depths of sadness, The Violent is the book you’re looking for. It’s an everything-that-can-go-wrong-does kind of story, but it’s so melancholy, so terribly disconcerting that it could be likened to the cliché car-crash. The book pulls the reader in instantaneously. It’s real. It’s relatable. It’s hopeless, like so many of us.
I’ve always been a little bewildered when it comes to the Silent Hill franchise. Sometimes the stories are smooth operating machines with clear characters, conflicts and conclusions. And then again sometimes you come across a book like Dead Alive, and don’t have the slightest clue what the hell is going on. Oh, how I wished this one hadn’t been so abstract, but hey – we’ll get through it!
The Vulturions aren’t exactly marquee menaces in Spider-Man’s world. They’re actually two-bit hooligans who joined forces to claim power and riches after their eventual leader, Honcho duped an imprisoned Adrian Toomes (better known as The Vulture) into spilling the technical secrets of his by-now infamous wings. When Honcho gets out of the slammer, he does so fully prepared to assemble four pair of wings, one for he and the thugs in his crew.
Fred Van Lent is one of hell of a writer, and as it just so happens, Guiu Vilanova is an excellent artist. Together these two deliver an absolutely unmissable story: Weird Detective. If crime noir, bleak horror and Lovecraft influence is a mixture you can wrap your head around, you may actually fall in love with this book.
Warning: This review contains spoilers, so if you’ve yet to read Joe Haldeman’s novel, or this particular issue, be leery of the facts divulged.
Joe Haldeman and Marvano join forces to deliver a riveting adaptation of Haldeman’s own Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel of the same name, and while this may be a different medium, it’s a captivating piece of work all the same; Haldeman has maximized the effectiveness of a modern masterpiece, and that not only opens his story up to a demographic that may have missed his novel, it’s also worth serious applause. This is a true masterwork of fiction, plain and simple.
In a space age dystopian hell, one man rules an entire body of the living. Those trapped on the prison ship, Empyreon are slaves to an all-powerful and profoundly ruthless leader known as Khaal. He is, for lack of a better term, a tyrant, and there is no escaping him for the prison Empyreon is the only existing ship in the galaxy.
With Johnny Blaze’s origin story out of the way (see Marvel Spotlight), Marvel opens up and gifts the spirit of vengeance his very own book, and it’s a winner through and through. Released way back in September of 1973, Ghost Rider was one of the more popular horror titles post-code for Marvel Comics, who’d been hot and cold with genre titles for years thanks to the lunacy of the Comics Code. But the code’s stranglehold continued to loosen sometime around 1970 and Marvel got right down to introducing all sorts of killer monster books. While there are a few vintage titles I love, none had the staying power (or sales) of Ghost Rider, who remains a hot commodity today.
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