A young surgeon finds her life turned upside down when a conflict between the Norse gods spills into her life in VALKYRIE, a generally pleasant and attractively drawn miniseries. Susan takes her job so seriously that she’s alienating colleagues and getting herself suspended, but that isn’t the worst of her problems. Instead, she has to contend with being stalked by Loki and a rogue valkyrie for a sword and power she doesn’t even know she possesses. Plus, she’s inadvertently destroyed her alarm clock and there’s a good chance she’ll miss her next shift at the hospital if she forgets to replace it.

VALKYRIE goes down pretty easy, in good part due to Susan being an appealing person. We all want medical care from someone who cares as much as her. They also manage to dress her reasonably and not put her in Witchblade/whore garb, even when the valkyrie spirit finally arrives. Unfortunately, the creative team struggles to write and draw the men in the story, giving the book its weakest moments; none of them feel like much more than cardboard plot contrivances, including the Norse pantheon.

The production quality is solid, and the colors jump off the page, making this a fine-looking book as well as one that does a solid job of entertain. Worth keeping an eye on.

Marc Mason

In a future just ahead of ours, sexism is apparently alive and well. That, a kick-ass car, and a surly attitude, helps Shelby Cooper win street race after street race and take the hard earned cash of guys stupid enough to take her on. But her life takes a sharp turn when she calls her brother, a city dweller, for help in getting a car part. The cities have banned drinking, smoking, pornography, profanity… and internal combustion engines. A war between superhumans set the cleaned up cities in motion seven years prior, but what Shelby doesn’t know is that her family played a part in that war… and it’s about to catch up to her.

The creative team slipped me a preview for this book back in September, but it gave me no indication of how good this would turn out to be. Shelby is an interesting character, and her predicament is well written and smartly rendered. The art is a little too chessecake-y at times, but for the most part, it serves the story and does solid work in delivering the action sequences. The colors are also rendered vividly, making this a nice package as a whole.

Shelby’s confrontation at the end of the book sets up a smart cliffhanger that promises lots of good stuff ahead, and this looks to be the kind of comic that cold become a flagship title for an indy publisher. I look forward to seeing more of this one.

Marc Mason

At the risk of repeating myself: anthologies are a damned tricky business. There’s a certain level of risk involved versus the reward, as most work out to a mixed bag; only a small amount of the stories tend to be good, and most work out to be mediocre and all-out crap. So it becomes even dicier when a small indy publisher puts out an anthology; you’re bound to get a lot of product produced by younger, untested talents, and that increases the risk immensely. So along comes Arcana with what I believe to be its first anthological effort, and needless to say, I was more than a bit dubious.
 
But… surprise! DARK HORRORS turns out to be a very, very good effort. The material does span the gamut from terrific to crap, but a solid amount of what’s presented here is quite readable and entertaining. Plus, there are a couple of genuine and pleasant surprises, first among them being a new ETERNAL ROMANCE story from Janet Hetherington. There’s also a new KONI WAVES piece, a modern adaptation of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and a terrific bit called “The Exchange” by writer Chris Lynch and artist Stuart. On the flip side, only a couple of the stories truly fall completely flat, and that’s a real coup for editors Aaron Nelson and James Nadiger.

The other smart thing about DARK HORRORS is that it’s presented in digest format, making it affordable and easily shelved near the manga, enhancing its visibility. This is really one of the better books we’ve seen come out of Arcana Studio, and if they can maintain the quality level, I hope to see more like it.

Marc Mason

10TH MUSE VS. EZRA
Written by Sean O’Reilly and Drawn by Vicenter Cifuentes

Inter-company crossovers have become increasingly rare these days, and 10th MUSE VS. EZRA is kind of a pointer as to why: it is extremely difficult to come up with a credible story that brings two disparate characters together in a united universe, and to explain the characters well enough that the audiences that show up for the event can understand the other side. This is precisely where this book runs into trouble.

I’m very familiar with EZRA, having read her adventures back to her first trade paperback. She’s a deadly warrior, carries a big sword, and kills a lot of bad guys. Easy. But I’ve never read 10TH MUSE, and even with a small write-up on the inside front cover, I had no sense of who she was and what her powers were by the end of the book. Late in the story she fires some sort of energy bolt for the first and only time, but I didn’t know what it did or what its effect was, or why she hadn’t used it previously. I was also confused as to why the character dresses like a 90s rave kid, even when propelled backwards in time to meet up with Ezra; if she’s a Greek muse, I’m thinking a flowing robe was a more likely costume if she wanted to be incognito. But what do I know?

Again, that’s something pertaining directly to the character. O’Reilly is Ezra’s primary writer, not 10TH Muse’s; he’s working with the material that’s been given to him. He doesn’t necessarily have the chance here to make 10TH Muse interesting or to make her make sense. First, he has to make a story that will be a field for both characters. It just turns out that one of the characters is wholly uninteresting, no matter what set-up he delivers.

The book looks okay. Surprisingly, given a concept you’d expect to be milked for maximum cheesecake value, Cifuentes reins himself in and focuses on the storytelling as best he can. I commend him for that. In the end, I think that Ezra does serve as a decent character for crossover potential, but I think she’d be better off meeting Red Sonja or Shi. 10TH Muse just isn’t the girl for the woman with the gray skin.

Marc Mason

KONI WAVES #1-3/MAKING WAVES: THE ART OF KONI WAVES
Written by Mark Poulton and Drawn by Stephen Sistilli

Koni Kanawai knows how to enjoy her life. She danced the pole to put herself through college, calling herself “Koni Waves”. She loved justice and went to the police academy and became a cop. She also discovered her love of the grape, and her drinking got her an early exit from the force. Now she works as a private detective, handling cases of bizarre and arcane nature. Oh, and she still loves the booze, as well as the occasional late-night hookup with a local surfing stud. How could you not love her?

In case you were wondering about that “cases of bizarre and arcane nature”… over the course of these three issues, she has to face off against a businessman offering human sacrifices to the tiki god he worships, a group of vampires who enjoy the ocean a bit too much, and a shape-shifting alien creature that crashes into a volcano and begins terrorizing the locals. Koni isn’t quite working the same beat as Thomas Magnum, you see.

Ultimately, as odd as the plots are, the stories are just kind of in the “decent” range. The actual cases really don’t feel compelling, partially because of the “done in one” nature of the book. It becomes difficult to get overly invested in the horror of the alien when you know he’ll be gone in three pages. But Sistelli’s art more than balances out that problem. His work brings the characters alive on the page, and he works in a style that isn’t being overused right now in comics.

KONI is a book that definitely has growth potential. I think once the creative team finds its footing and gets a solid grasp on where they want to take the character, it could become something special.

MAKING WAVES is a nice package of artistic tributes to the character and series. Numerous artists offer paintings, sketches, and pinups, and there are few duds in the bunch. The best entry graces the cover, a stunning painting from Edison Girard. It captures the beauty of Koni and her surroundings perfectly. At eight bucks, I’d have liked to have seen the book have a spine, but it’s still a solid effort.

Marc Mason