Danger Club 1 - 4 by Landry Q Walker and Eric Jones

 I like Danger Club because it is violent.

Gleefully violent.

Punches are thrown and chunks of cheek are ripped off. Bright red blood sprays out across the page. Bones crunch. Heads are vaporised.

you got red on you...

The promise of graphic violence is what drew me to this comic, I'd seen a preview or a couple of unlettered panels or SOMETHING (or maybe I read something about it...) and I thought I'd check it out.

What I found delivered on the violence but it also had a great premise and an actual plot to back it all up. 

The set up is that some cosmic terror heading for Earth drew all the superheroes into space to confront it. Three months have passed and it's pretty clear they aren't coming back. Danger Club tells the story of the teen sidekicks that were left behind and what they have made of the world that is in crisis.

yeah there is a robot too!

I won't talk much about the plot as it is very clear that there is an intricate plot being woven here and you ought to experience that for yourselves. What I will say is Walker has taken great care to introduce us to these characters that he has already created a world and lore for. There is a sense that this series could be part of a larger, over arching continuity that went before. 

Each issue starts with a page rendered in a really neat Silver age style, this really adds to the feel that these characters have had adventures before, back when things were more innocent and there was less blood.

When I read Danger Club I get this weird nostalgia thing, like when I read series like Akira or Watchmen, like I know what's coming but I still get excited....I'm not saying Danger Club is predictable (it's anything but) I'm saying it hits those same beats, pulls the rug out from under you and throws you curveballs (then follows up the curveball with a tooth shattering blow to the face with a baseball bat)

allow me to explain about the glow knuckle dusters..

One of the best set pieces in Danger Club (and a great example of the above mentioned rug-pulling, 'fuck me that's awesome' moments) is when Kid Vigilante retrieves some glowing knuckle dusters from the moon in order to beat the living fuck out of Apollo, some sort of god sidekick. Just re-read that and let it sink in. Yeah...I know....FUCKING AWESOME!

Danger Club represents what comics should be about to me, action and gore collide with an perfectly paced story literally dripping with ideas and cool characters. 

What I picked up on a whim turned out to be one of my favourite comics of recent time, Image Comics pull another winner out of the bag. Between this, Prophet, Bulletproof Coffin, Manhattan Projects and Fatale Image has 2012 in the bag!

The trade of the first four issues came out last week, it's around £7 in print or £3.99 digitally.....it's fucking ace pick it up or i'll retrieve a set of glowing knuckle dusters from the moon and punch your god damn jaw off.

BEDLAM #1 by Nick Spencer and Riley Rossmo

We've been gone a while... again. But we will always come back - I promise!

Last time we were here, I ventured into the darkness of Happy #1, and asserted that perhaps that book was in fact trying to shake us out of the darkness. I return this week to delve further into the darkness than ever before, as I look at last week's new offering from wunderkind writer Nick Spencer, Bedlam.

First, context. You may remember my profile of writer Nick Spencer from January this year where I gushed about the man's talents, prior to my meeting him at Kapow this year where I gushed all over him in person. Since then, his magnum opus Morning Glories has reached new heights of insanity and is approaching its quarter-way-through mark, still introducing mystery after mystery. Meanwhile, we patiently await the fifth and final issue of Infinite Vacation, regarded by many to be Spencer's finest work thus far; a nightmarish modernisation of Dickian ideas. In between, we've been treated to Spencer's solid scripting of Robert Kirkman's Thief of Thieves, which despite its flaws was snappy and involving in terms of all-important dialogue. Riley Rossmo, meanwhile, has been one of my favourite artists of the last couple of years, and you may also remember me heaping praise upon the man for his work on Green Wake and Debris quite recently.

Bedlam, then, is the first meeting of these two talents, and does not disappoint. The writing is dense and confident, the art never more suited to the subject matter. Bravely packing a first issue with 50+ pages, Spencer and Rossmo are carving a work of admirable density, not only in terms of plot but thematically too.

There are many sadistic, psychologically damaged villains in comics, whether their psychopathy is overtly discussed or merely implied - although post-Watchmen and post-Miller, we all know that our heroes have been as damaged as our villains. This book takes the deranged psychopath motif and poses the simple question of what happens to such a character after he's stopped being the villain. As the tagline on the cover reads, 'Is evil just something you are, or something you do?' Now upon first reading, I found that tagline kind of trite - maybe it could be put better - but anyhow, maybe we need to just think about its implications. It is, after all, the theme of the book.

Madder Red is our psychopath, straight out of the Batman Nolanverse's deepest unlexplored recesses of nihlistic violence and murder. We're introduced to him in a sequence set 10 years previous, as he performs unthinkable acts. Rossmo delivers in spades with these flashback sequences, a nightmare in black, red and white. Oh yeah, and did I mention Madder Red is absolutely fucking terrifying?

 

We flip between Madder Red's 'heyday' and the present, where our other protagonist. Fillmore Press, goes about his daily business... the awesome hook is of course that Fillmore Press is Madder Red, ten years older and basically a different guy. The stage is set for an examination of what has led this character here - and the possibilities are endless. Having been drawn into believing the character as one entity in the flashback scenes, we're then presented with a character who is an opposite, a complete Other. Not frightening in himself, but disturbing in our knowledge that he is in fact the same person who is performing the unspeakable acts we see as we turn the page. Fillmore Press is more elusive, inviting us to feel ambivalent about him as he remains unassuming and, for want of a better word, 'normal', the only clue to his previous misdeeds being his skewed, masked version of himself staring back from his bathroom mirror.

Spencer has affirmed himself as a writer who is going to ask big questions with his work. With every limited series he gives to Image he not only dazzles creatively but also reassures long term readers of his work that he's got a plan... with Morning Glories becoming more of a headfuck each month it's almost as if he's reassuring us with layered and beautiful work like this that he's got a plan. And maybe, so does Madder Red?