By Patrick Larose
“No curses. No wars. No love.”
These are the three rules the only wizard in New York City sets for his clients.
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Review: Batgirl #5
By Patrick Larose
I initially intended this review to be a follow-up, post-mortem of my review for issue #4. I wanted to summarize in a type of I-Told-You-So style about how the series failed to utilize its own new concepts and rushed its story to the end.
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Review: Hadrian's Wall #3 & Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye #2
By Patrick Larose
There’s a particular type of dissonance between being a consumer and a critic. As a consumer, there’s really only ever one question—is the product any good?
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Review: Psycho-Pass: Inspector Shinya Kogami vol 1
By Patrick Larose
The police procedural is to me what grilled cheese is to most people—it’s my comfort food. The narrative beats and structural format hit me like a good song with that experience of getting to watch some jaded but good-hearted cops push through the morbidity of the every-day murder and the explore the personal frustrations and weaving webs we create just in carrying out our day-to-day lives.
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Review: Batgirl #4
By Patrick Larose
A part of me wonders that when an independent comic creator enters the mainstream superhero genre, there’s this pressure to emphasize the superhero aspect in a superhero story.
Read MoreReview: Hadrian's Wall #2
By Patrick Larose
Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with being a good one of those.
Hadrian’s Wall is a murder mystery, or rather, a locked-room detective story set in space. One where a would-be detective investigates a mysterious death aboard a space station only the victim here isn't some random astronaut but instead the investigator’s former best friend and his ex-wife’s current husband. Out here in the quiet dark of space, everyone's a suspect and everyone has something to hide.
Read MoreReview: Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye #1
By Patrick Larose
Cave Carson was never meant to be a superhero.
When he was created in 1960 for DC Comics, he was molded to fit a pulp fiction archetype that didn’t fight crime and didn’t have super powers. Cave Carson was an adventurer.
Read MoreReview: Luke Cage E.04 – “Step in the Arena”
By Patrick Larose
Luke Cage’s history of a comic book character was born from the popularization of the Blaxploitation film genre during the 1970s. A bunch of white dudes caught on by how popular these action movies made by black people and starring black people were getting that they saw a new market to, well, exploit.
Read MoreReview: Luke Cage E.03 - "Who's Gonna Take the Weight"
By Patrick Larose
If the first two episodes of Luke Cage were like watching superhero Shakespeare, then "Who’s Gonna Take the Weight” is all about becoming an emotional catharsis to answer our pent-up frustration with tragedy. When people talk about Shakespeare or when they call something Shakespearean, they’re usually talking about dudes in puffy shirts, star-crossed characters, and big speeches. You won't catch me doing that, though. I'd offer up , rather, that at the core of every Shakespeare play are characters who are driven by complex needs and forced to navigate their complex social and political hierarchies. They’re a realm of emotional politicking and that description is what the first two episodes of Luke Cage felt like.
Read MoreReview: Green Valley #1
By Patrick Larose
Green Valley #1 is everything I hate about reviewing single-issue series. This isn’t even really the fault of the comic itself but instead all the hype and marketing around it. When Green Valley was first announced there was this intense secrecy about it. Every interview following its announcement showed four knights facing off a barbarian horde. They’re friends, this is a fantasy comic it should be straight-forward but the writer, Max Landis, made sure to preface every interview with an “I can’t tell you anything about it without spoiling it.” The tagline itself invites us to question everything that happens in this comic: Kill a wizard, and slay his dragons. But there’s no such thing as wizards, dragons don’t exist.
Read MoreReview: Justice League #6
By Patrick Larose
Dear Justice League #6,
It’s been quite the trip, huh?
When I found you, it was my first week writing at Comic Bastards. I was at a pretty bad place in my life then. I wasn’t happy or secure in my day job, I was feeling creatively exhausted and drained. I’d been living in Philadelphia for a year and felt as if I hadn’t moved a step from when I came.
Read MoreReview: Spell on Wheels #1
By Patrick Larose
There are some things I really like about the comic book industry right now. There’s still plenty of bad to go around. The single-issue market is still broken, the comic book movie boom didn’t save the industry, and nor has their business practices ever successfully adapted to the Internet era and while diversity's up, it's never quite as up as it needs to be. All that said, however, it’s got one thing going for it that I dig a lot. Now more than ever do comics have such wide breadth of tonal and genre variation. There’s not just one perfect comic out there for somebody, there’s four or five.
Read MoreReview: Intertwined #1
By Patrick Larose
Intertwined is a comic that sells itself as a mash-up between the crime noir and kung fu genres, however, I think I’d offer up a different description. Rather, I’d argue that Intertwined is a comic that uses the machinations of Hong Kong action cinema to tell a story ultimately driven by the pathos of superhero storytelling.
Read MoreReview: Head Lopper vol. 1
By Patrick Larose
Over the last half-decade whenever a comic has tried to tell a fantasy story in a fantasy setting, they’ve almost always strived towards reinvention and deconstruction. We can see this with Princeless’s deconstruction and critical eye towards the damsel-in-distress and princess tropes of classic fantasy, Saga’s visual reinvention of what exactly a Star Wars-fantasy setting can look like, and in Rat Queen’s self-aware Dungeon & Dragon’s campaign of a comic.
Read MoreReview: Batgirl #3
By Patrick Larose
There is so much I really like about this new Batgirl series. Rafael Albuquerque’s art is a must-see with his dynamic action scenes or the interesting and weird page layouts that demonstrate Barbara’s thought processes and movements. Dave McCaig’s colors have made these moments even more visually engaging with his attentive background color work.
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