Reviews: Faker, The Highwaymen, Welcome to Tranquility

Faker issue 1 by Mike Carey (writer), Jock (artist), Clem Robins (letterer), Lee Loughridge (colourist) and Shelly Bond (editor), 24 pages of strip, DC Comics/Vertigo, September 2007, US$2.99

A group of students at Minnesota University get drunk in a cybernetics-cum-biological laboratory and wake up with identity problems.

Oh dear, this is a mess. It’s most obvious problem is that all the characters are deeply unpleasant, most notably the narrator, who has seduced her professor with the intention of blackmailing him. This nastiness is not offset by any wit or compelling characterisation. The storytelling is confusing. Without the blurb, I wouldn’t really have known what was going on – not in the sense that there’s a mystery, but in the sense that the narrative is badly constructed. There are pages of decompressed pacing used for no readily apparent reason. Key transitions are missed: how did they get into that laboratory, for example?

Jock is usually a reliable artist with a good sense of composition and mood, but his ragged, jagged artwork makes all the characters look to be in their thirties at least.


“Everyone has something to hide,” reads the cover blurb. Well, don’t worry. I won’t come looking.


The Highwaymen issue 1 “Sick & Retired” by Marc Bernadin and Adam Freeman (writers), Lee Garbett (penciller), Jonny Rench (colourist), Rob Leigh (letterer) and Scott Peterson (editor), cover by Brian Stelfreeze, 22 pages of strip, DC Comics/Wildstorm, August 2007, US$2.99

In 2021, two elderly ex-secret agents are called out of retirement by a message from the late President Bill Clinton, and find themselves in opposition to the current CIA.

This reads so much like an illustrated pitch for a summer action blockbuster buddy-movie that I was surprised to find that it was published by Wildstorm rather than by Boom! Studios. The big action sequence this issue has our heroes on a bus full of old folks being chased by several car loads of CIA agents. It’s well enough done, with some amusing dialogue from the elderly passengers in particular, but I don’t think comics is a medium as well suited to this sort of thing as film is.


Artists Garbett and Rench have a strong Frank Quitely influence, which is surprisingly rare, when you consider how long Quitely has been a critics’ favourite.

Worth a look if you’re on a Live Free or Die Hard kick and want something similar in comics form, but not compelling.


Welcome to Tranquility issue 8, written by Gail Simone, colours by Carrie Strachan, letters by Lanham and Pat Brosseau, edited by Abernathy and Quinn, cover by Neil Googe, 22 pages of strip, DC Comics/Wildstorm, September 2007, US$2.99
features: introductory page with art by Neil Googe
The Ferocious Lindo Sisters “What You Really Want!”, art by Jason Pearson
Zombie Zeke “Dead End Highway”, art by Chriscross
The Emoticon “Not My Type”, art by Georges Jeanty (penciller) and Peter Guzman (inker)

Presumably an interlude between story arcs to allow Neil Googe to keep up with his schedule, this issue is drawn by a fine assortment of artists with an approach sympathetic to his. We get the origin stories of Zombie Zeke, the Crypt-Keeper type who looks after the Tranquility cemetery, and of small-time super-villain the Emoticon, as well as some formative events in the youth of Sheriff Thomasina Lindo. Each story is a neat little vignette in its own right, and each links with the others in minor but effective ways.


This is a fill-in issue in more ways than one: it gives the regular artist a break, but allows Simone to fill in more of Tranquility’s background, adding depth to her fictional setting. It’s an interesting, and, I think, more successful, contrast to the recent issue of The Spirit which also featured three stories by guest artists (and writers), but which seemed entirely separate from the ongoing series.

Reviews: Franklin Richards, Re-Gifters, Tank Girl

Franklin Richards: World Be Warned issue 1 “Gravity Depravity!”, “Bully Breakdown!”, “Monkey Talk!”, “Build a Better 'Bot!” and “Frank Smash!” by Chris Eliopoulos (story, art and letters), Marc Sumerak (story and script), Brad Anderson (colours) and Mark Paniccia (editor), 25 pages of strip, Marvel Comics, August 2007, US$2.99

The cover suggests that this is going to be a parody of Marvel’s current “World War Hulk” cross-over storyline. This turns out not to be the case, which is lucky for me, as I tend not to read the mainstream Marvel titles and would probably have missed most of the jokes. Instead, it’s business as usual: Reed and Sue Richards’ young son Franklin getting into various wild scrapes, usually as a result of stealing some of his father’s gadgets, to the exasperation of his robot babysitter, HERBIE, while the Fantastic Four remain mostly oblivious.

The Hulk does appear in one of the five short tales here, but it is in his classic, infantile state. Reed has promised him a candy bar in return for taking part in some tests. Cue Franklin.


The Franklin Richards series continues to live in the shadow of Calvin and Hobbes, to which it owes much of its style and tone, although Franklin’s adventures are real (within the context of the story), not imaginary. Eliopoulos suffers most from the comparison, his art looking flat and empty compared with Bill Watterson’s remarkably accomplished and inventive draughtsmanship. But this is still good-natured and funny stuff.


Re-Gifters, written by Mike Carey, art by Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel, grey tones by Jesse Hamm, lettering by John J Hill, 144 pages of strip, DC Comics/Minx, 2007, US$9.99

Re-Gifters tells a story that conforms to a familiar pattern: Girl pursues The Wrong Boy, and in doing so neglects Her Real Self (represented here by taking part in a Hapkaido martial arts contest). When she reconnects with Her Real Self, she achieves self-respect, acclaim and The Right Boy.

Carey, Liew and Hempel may be following a formula of teenage fiction, but they do so in a lively way, with a well-paced story with lots of humour and quirky detail. For example, the title refers to a unique statuette, which the Girl (Dixie) gives to The Wrong Boy, who then gives it to the girl he’s really interested in it. The statuette passes through various hands before being given back to Dixie by The Right Boy. It’s a neat narrative macguffin which helps crystalise her disillusionment with The Wrong Boy.


Being every bit as much a white-middle aged Englishman as the writer, I have no idea if the portrayal of the Korean-American community of Los Angeles, from which Dixie springs, is authentic, but it feels convincing.

Liew and Hempel provide artwork that is loose, fluid and expressive, and which lifts every page. Notice here how the warped shape of the auditorium mirrors the heroine’s agitation and confusion.


Well worth a read, even if you are not one of the teenage girls at whom DC’s Minx line is aimed.


Tank Girl: The Gifting issue 1 “The Dogshit in Barney’s Handbag”, “Kill Jumbo!”, “The Gifting”, “Haiku”, “The Funsters Will Play”, written by Alan C Martin, art by Ashley H Wood, letters by Robbie Robbins, editor Chris Ryall, 22 pages of strip, IDW Publishing, May 2007, US$3.99

When Tank Girl first appeared in Deadline back in 1988, it seemed like a breath of fresh air (though Tank Girl herself probably never smelled particularly fresh). Creators Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett either were or seemed young, and irreverent and hip, and their mix of sniggering humour, violence and spontaneity struck a cord with readers who also wanted to think of themselves as young, and irreverent and hip.

Tank Girl: The Gifting presents much the same mix as before: Martin’s crude jokes packed into barely-structured squib stories told in the wild art of a hot artist. But Hewlett is gone, and Ashley Wood has taken his place. Where Hewlett seemed to be making it up as he went along, Wood’s seems to be a carefully-planned wildness. And the thought kept nagging at me that, surely, Alan Martin must have grown up at least a little bit in the last 19 years. Is this just a pose? Was it just a pose back then?


So there is an air of calculation to this issue that makes it seem not quite right. It’s still amusing, in a puerile sort of way, and it’s strikingly drawn, but I’d hate to see Tank Girl become the oldest swinger in town.