Review: Last Flight of the Harbinger

Last Flight of the Harbinger by Jason Aaron
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Anybody know how to hotwire an Imperial Star Destroyer?

Rebellion sympathizers on a planet are being starved out by the Empire. Luke and Leia hatch a plan to hijack a Star Destroyer so they can use the massive ship to run the blockade and bring relief supplies to them. Stealing the ship turns out to be the easy part as they try to run the damaged vessel with a minimal crew, and an elite squad of Stormtroopers led by Sgt. Kreel have a plan to take the ship back and capture some valuable prizes in the process. Along with that we get another tale from the journal of Ben Kenobi about how he once faced the Wookie bounty hunter Black Krrsantan and lived to tell about it.

Kind of a mixed bag here. The idea of the good guys space jacking a Star Destroyer is a cool one, and that story has a lot of great stuff although I question going to all the trouble of stealing an Imperial ship and not doing anything other than using it for anything other than a battering ram. It’s also fun to see a young Leia, Han, and Luke doing regular-degular missions for the Rebels. My favorite part of the collection was the side story about Kreel’s squad of Stormtroopers taking out a city occupied by Rebels forces because we get to see somebody in the Empire besides Darth Vader be good at their jobs for a change.

The problems once again come when because these are prequels and so we know how things ultimately turn out as well as that certain things can’t happen. The worst of this is the Kenobi story because once again he’s trying to do stuff on Tatooine without giving away that he’s a Jedi because we KNOW that he just hid out there on the down low while Luke was growing up. That’s extremely limiting. The other thing I didn’t care for was all the bickering between Han and Leia because we all know that it’s because they’re in love, but they can’t acknowledge it because it doesn’t happen until Empire Strikes Back so we’re stuck in this zone which even one character acknowledges is extremely irritating.

There’s good stuff here, but just the nature of when this story takes place kind of handcuffs the whole thing.

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Review: Killer Choice

Killer Choice by Tom Hunt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received a free advance copy of this for review from the publisher.

Gary and Beth Foster are a nice couple who truly love each other, and their idea of a good time is playing Scrabble or watching Netflix. They don’t have a lot of money, but they’re happy just being together. Now that Beth has finally gotten pregnant after years of trying they feel like things couldn’t get any better. Which is exactly the point when life tends to kick nice people in the junk.

After Beth collapses while out shopping she’s quickly diagnosed with a particularly nasty brain tumor that will barely allow her to give birth before dying, but there’s a new procedure in Europe that might extend her life for years. Unfortunately, it will cost them $200,000 to try it, and they don’t have anywhere near that kind of cash. As hope begins to fade Gary receives a phone call with an offer for him to earn all the money they need. The catch is that he’ll have to murder someone to get it.

This debut novel from Tom Hunt is the kind of high concept hook that has put many a book on the best seller list and sold a lot of tickets to movies, and there’s a reason for that – it works. Or at least it works when there’s some talent behind the idea, and there’s definitely talent here. Hunt’s got a way of laying it all out in the straight forward fashion that many a crime writer has, and he’s also got the knack of making that style compelling.

There’s two things that really stood out for me. First, is that there’s a good amount of time spent on the efforts that are done by Beth and Gary with the help of their friends and family to come up with the money. They put pleas on the internet, hold events like hot dog dinners, and tell their story to the media all as part of the desperate fundraising only to realize that after all that it's not even close to being enough. It’s a bleak portrait of how Americans often have to resort to glorified begging to get medical treatment.

The other part is the story of Otto, the man asking Gary to commit a murder for hire. Otto is a ex-con who runs a pawn shop as a front for his real business of dealing drugs, and he’s got a huge problem that has made him desperate enough to try and use an average guy as a killer. We get Otto’s story told in parallel, and his criminal underworld couldn’t be more different than Gary’s suburban life. The contrast between the two is well done and underlines the desperate measures that both men feel driven to even if they have nothing else in common. On the downside Gary’s bland niceness is too much at times, and his hand wringing about the morality of murder does get a little old after a while. It was never enough to completely take me out of the story though.

What seems like an airplane read on the surface takes turns that ultimately make me think of this of outright noir. It’s solid crime story, and I’ll certainly check out what Tom Hunt does next.

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Review: Snow

Snow by Mike Bond
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received a free copy of this for review from NetGalley.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Some seemingly law-abiding citizens stumble across something valuable and decide to keep it even though they know it will be dangerous to do so. Oh, you have heard it? Yeah, it’s been around a while.

Zach is a former NFL player turned television announcer, and Steve is his old friend and investment manager. They take an annual hunting trip to Montana every year where their buddy Curt acts as their guide while they camp in the woods. The guys are having trouble enjoying their vacation since Zach has run up huge gambling debts in Vegas and needs cash quickly while Wall Street shenanigans have wiped out the savings Steve was managing for him. This has also put Steve into a very deep hole that might ruin his family.

Zach comes across the crash of a small plane with hundreds of kilos of cocaine in it, and Steve immediately seizes on the idea of taking drugs and selling them to as a way of getting out of their mutual financial crisis. Because there’s no chance that an organization capable of filling a plane with millions of dollars of drugs will ever come looking for it, right?

Despite Zach’s reservations they haphazardly start a scheme that involves keeping the secret from Curt. Things escalate quickly. Mistake piles upon mistake. And just like that Zach and Steve are in deep trouble and soon realize that they can’t even trust each other anymore.

The trope of an ordinary person finding a bag of money or drugs which takes them straight down the path to hell is one I generally appreciate. However, this one seemed pretty clichéd. It starts out with a very similar set-up to Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan and then quickly morphs into an attempt at doing something like Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. (And those are two way better books I’d recommend if you’re in the mood for this kind of thing.) From there we cycle through all the checkpoints you’d expect to cross. You’ve got your ruthless enforcer from the drug cartel, a dedicated cop, some innocent people getting screwed over, etc. etc.

There’s also the odd way that it veers into social commentary and existential angst. Many a good crime novel includes these elements, but the writing here just seems to swing wildly from following the plot to going off on tangents about the environment, the perils of capitalism, and the way everyday life can chip at the soul. Those are all subjects that can easily and naturally pop up in a book like this, but the way they’re presented here often seems clumsy and ill-timed.

The most original aspect are the characters of Zach and Steve. The set-up leans in the direction of treating the football hero Zach as the good guy led astray by the fast talking Steve, but we get a more interesting perspective as we learn more about them. Zach is actually more of a hypocrite and selfish guy then he first appears while Steve isn’t quite the Wall Street d-bag you’d assume from the beginning. The way they almost accidently create an escalating mess is a great depiction of how quickly things can fall apart for someone once they decide to cross the line.

Despite its shortcomings I’m still a sucker for these kind of crime stories, and there was some very good character work done as well as some nicely atmospheric stuff that takes us from the snowy woods to the streets of Las Vegas. It’s not bad, but I can think of several better ones.

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Review: Velvet, Vol. 3: The Man Who Stole the World

Velvet, Vol. 3: The Man Who Stole the World by Ed Brubaker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Velvet comes to Washington D.C. as part of her effort to clear her name and expose the conspiracy that set her up. To do this she’ll need to blackmail Gerald Ford and kidnap Richard Nixon.

And I thought Jason Bourne was dangerous.

I gotta admit that I was a little let down by this one. Velvet is still an awesome character as a middle-aged lady spy kicking ass, and the artwork continues to be top notch as we see her get into a variety of situations that would make great action scenes in any blockbuster movie. Yet as we wrap things up the plot starts to collapse under the weight of it’s spy-vs-spy machinations with so many betrayals and twists that even John le Carre would need a flow chart to keep track of all of it. Frankly, I’m still kinda confused as to why the entire thing happened to begin with.

The ending also seems to indicate that there will be more Velvet at some point, but it hasn’t happened yet so it’s kind of unsatisfying. Although I guess there is a TV series in development so maybe that’ll motivate Ed Brubaker to return to this at some point.

Still, the three volumes that made up this story were some great comics that were well worth reading, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed that we see Velvet return in a slightly more coherent story someday.


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Review: Velvet, Vol. 2: The Secret Lives of Dead Men

Velvet, Vol. 2: The Secret Lives of Dead Men by Ed Brubaker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Everyone at the super-secret British spy agency ARC-7 thought Velvet Templeton was just the Director’s secretary until their best agent was murdered, and she was accused of turning traitor and killing him. It also turned out that she used to be a top notch field agent.

See, that’s why you should always be nice to the admin in your office….

Actually, we know that Velvet was framed, and to clear her name she’s going on the offensive against her old organization to try and flush out the real traitor. Through the course of the story we’ve also learned the tragic event that took Velvet out of the field and put her behind a desk for years. Fortunately for her sake and our entertainment value Velvet hasn’t lost a step as she uses sneaky spy tactics and a general ability to kick ass to find out the truth.

This could be just your standard betrayed-spy-on-the-run story, but there’s two factors that make it seem fresh. First, the ‘70s setting was a smart choice and not just for the retro style it brings into it. The 21st century has given us all James Bond gadgets with the average smart phone acting as a handheld computer, camera, and tracking device, but by setting this back in days of yore it allows for some fun with classic spy stuff that modern technology has made commonplace. It also makes the things they do use like Velvet’s stolen bulletproof stealth suit with glider wings seem more inventive.

Velvet herself is the second thing that makes this stand out. The idea of essentially taking Miss Moneypenny and making her a bad ass was a nice hook, and in a time when females in comics is a hot topic having a 40-something woman be the fully formed hero of a series like this seems way more revolutionary then it should be. (It also probably means we’ll never see a movie version of it because Hollywood believes that old ladies such as Marisa Tomei can only play characters like Aunt May.)

Ed Brubaker is one of the best writers in comics, and here he teams up with artist Steve Epting to create a humdinger filled with spy vs. spy action.

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Review: Velvet, Vol. 1: Before the Living End

Velvet, Vol. 1: Before the Living End by Ed Brubaker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Other reviewers have already pointed out that this story essentially asks what would happen if James Bond got killed, and it turned out that Miss Moneypenny was more of a bad-ass than he ever was? So in an effort to come up with a new way of describing this I’ll ask what if Sterling Archer got killed, and Cheryl/Carol was more of a bad-ass than he ever was?

In 1973 Velvet Templeton is the secretary to the director of super-secret spy agency ARC-7. After their best agent is ambushed and killed Velvet is implicated as the mole who set him up, but it turns out that she knows a lot more than just how to take shorthand. Velvet was actually a great field agent in the ‘50s before events forced her into accepting a desk job. To clear her name Velvet has to get back in the spy game to track down who actually betrayed their agent.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the lack of diversity in comics as well as the movies adapted from them, and it’s very refreshing to have the lead of this promising series be a forty-something female in an era where women were either the secretary to the good guys or the honey trap working for the bad guys. And Velvet is an intriguing character with all the skills of Marvel’s Black Widow with the looks of real life hard-boiled crime writer Christa Faust minus the tattoos.

Brubaker again delivers a version of yet another fantastic genre tale with a unique twist to it. Epting’s excellent art is realistic enough to be storyboards for a movie but still stylized to provide the atmosphere of a Bond movie from the Sean Connery era. Maybe its best trick is the way that the story blends the old school comic book style spy action with the darker John le Carre tone of exploring the toll that working in covert espionage takes on someone.

Overall it’s a terrific comic that I can’t wait to read more of.

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Review: Criminal, Vol. 7: Wrong Time, Wrong Place

Criminal, Vol. 7: Wrong Time, Wrong Place by Ed Brubaker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips churn out so many excellent comics that I managed to completely miss that they did this one which was absolutely ‘criminal’ of me.

(Yeah, I know. I apologize for that one.)

We’re back with the Lawless family in the ‘70s as Teeg spends some time in jail reading comics and killing inmates who are trying to cash in on the price that’s been laid on his head for some reason. Once released Teeg takes his young son Tracy on a road trip during which Teeg is hunting people while Tracy is on the prowl for a particular comic.

As always the crime story and art here are top notch, but the extra treat is that we get to read bits of the ‘70s style comic magazines along with Teeg and Tracy. Teeg’s story is about a Conan style barbarian with all the nudity and violence that era’s black & white mags could offer while Tracy is reading the adventures of Fang, the Kung-Fu Werewolf. And now I really want Brubaker and Phillips to actually do a whole run of that title because who wouldn't want to read a comic about a kung-fu werewolf?

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