The Doomed Adventures of the Superfisters
You know how it is sometimes to look at photos from the 80s, where it's all cute young cheeks and happy tow-headed promise, and now twenty years later all the kids in the pictures have been worn down by their dreams falling apart and everything they love being taken away? (Or at least, that's how we feel when we listen to Bright Eyes.) So anyway, issue three of Joshua W. Cotter's "Skyscrapers of the Midwest" is like that. We'd like to thank the folks at Isotope Comics for putting us in a mood resembling that of Winona Rider in "Beetlejuice."
It's a beautiful, mournful look back at a miserable 1987, wherein a boy's emotions are repeatedly chiseled away by a world that doesn't care that he has any feelings at all. Nobody cares that his nose always bleeds, his friends deride his beloved toys, a girl whom he loves beats him up, and his mom promises that tomorrow will has much worse in store. It's as perfect a tour of childhood depression as you could hope for -- thank God like is only this depressing if you want it to be.
"Chronicles of Wormwood" by Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows sets up an interesting enough universe: in NYC, the sons of Satan and God snub their dads and live the lives THEY want, bitter and disinterested in sacrificing hard work to fulfilling prophecies or saving/damning mankind. So they just kind of hang out, drink, and somehow manage to sex Joan of Arc, who has some delightfully smutty dialogue. Neat idea, but it's all told in that conspicuously jaded, alpha-male, oh-so-worldly tone (you know the one; it's similar to the one New Yorkers affect when tell you where they live) and we're utterly over comics with that attitude. Congratulations of being tough as nails, "Wormwood," now do something interesting.