Review : Babyteeth #1
Quick — what do you get when you cross Juno with The Omen?
I can’t say I know for sure, but the answer could be the new Aftershock Comics series Babyteeth, the latest from the suddenly-quite-busy Donny Cates, cooked up in collaboration with Black Road artist/co-creator Garry Brown, which seems right off the bat to be a mash-up of those two popular films, but who knows? It could prove to be something else entirely as events proceed.
Here’s the run-down : 16-year-old Sadie of Salt Lake City, Utah, is more than just a nerdy social outcast comic book fan — she’s also pregnant. The old man — whoever he may be — isn’t around. She’s managed to keep her condition a secret from everyone barring her dope-dealing sister, Heather, but when her first contraction register a 5.0 on the fucking Richter Scale, well — this isn’t a situation that’s going to remain under wraps for long. And that’s about all we know, apart from the fact that the moment Sadie delivered her baby boy, Clark (named after you-know-who), she thinks she very well may have died. Oh, and for some reason she’s in Palestine now. We’ll see what that’s all about.
Cates takes a more light-hearted and comedic tone with his script than you might expect given its potentially-heavy subject matter, and stylistically this falls somewhere between the absolute play-it-for-laughs tone of his recently-concluded The Paybacks and the more cut-and-dried storytelling of his soon-to-be-wrapped God Country, and on the whole it works. Sadie’s first-person narration is effective in terms of its blunt honesty, and feels pretty well authentic to what a confused pregnant teenager would probably be thinking or feeling. The dialogue draws its characters in fairly broad, one-dimensional strokes, but what the hell? It’s a first issue, and some of these folks’ personalities and motivations are certain to have layers of depth added to them in, I would guess, pretty short order. I certainly can’t quibble with this book’s rapid-fire pacing, that’s for sure, but it’s also nice that things logically hold together here even though the story doesn’t slow down to the point where you really have a chance to examine it in much detail — at least the first time out, at any rate.
Brown, for his part, definitely delivers the goods as far as the art goes — his style is more defined and less “sketchy” than what we saw on Black Road, with a tighter, finer line and greater detail in the characters’ faces and body language, but it’s still fairly ink-heavy and abstract when it needs to be, so if you like what you’ve seen from him before — and I most certainly have — you’re more or less guaranteed to be impressed by the evolution of his overall “look” here. Top it off with some solid, workmanlike colors by Mark Englert, and what you’ve got in your hands is a pretty damn good-looking comic book.
All told, then, I’d have to say that I was reasonably impressed by Babyteeth #1. It didn’t blow me away or anything, but I felt like I got my money’s worth for my $3.99 (which I forked over out of pocket) and it set things up with enough style and panache to hook me for, at the very least, the short term. I’m not going to give it the longest leash in the world, but I have a reasonable amount of confidence that these quite good creators aren’t going to strangle themselves with their own collective umbilical cord.
Story: Donny Cates Art: Garry Brown
Story: 7.0 Art: 8.0 Overall: 7.5 Recommendation: Buy
The first issue of the new series Babyteeth already has me anxious for what comes next. Writer Donny Cates‘ quick-cut storytelling unfolds in a flashback as the narrator, sixteen-year old Sadie Ritter, tells her son the story of his birth. In just a few short pages, more questions are asked than answered in the best possible way. Who is this mystersious child, born on waves of earthquakes and bringing with him the end of the world? And if the world is over, how is Sadie still getting cell service?
Jimmy Regent, Britain’s number one super-spy, has got it all: intrigue, adventure, a license to shoot whoever he likes and beautiful women falling at his feet. He also has a new partner who isn’t quite as impressed by Jimmy as all other women appear to be. Now, there’s a price to pay for Jimmy’s multiple romantic conquests — the results of which are about to come calling in the worst possible way…
Christopher
Allie
Smoketown #2 (Scout Comics) – As an Army brat, I’m always happy to see stories that explore the life of military personnel and the demands that are made of them without most civilians really understanding what we’re asking them to do. Writer Philip Kennedy Johnson does a pretty good job with this crime fiction of a soldier returned from Afghanistan and the demands that his new civilian life makes of him, without understanding what has happened to him and what he’s dealing with. Artist Scott Van Domelen is also pretty good here, though still I think in a no man’s land between graphically flashy and kitchen-sink drama (I can’t help but compare his war sequences to Leandro Fernandez on The Old Guard). There’s something there, but not quite there yet. Overall 7.5 Recommendation: Read
Wednesdays are new comic book day! Each week hundreds of comics are released, and that can be pretty daunting to go over and choose what to buy. That’s where we come in!
Brett
Paul
Wednesdays are new comic book day! Each week hundreds of comics are released, and that can be pretty daunting to go over and choose what to buy. That’s where we come in!
Black Bolt #1 (Marvel) Sometimes I find I have very little to say about a comic other than “Yup, I liked it.” Overall: 7.75 Recommendation: Read
Eternal Empire #1 (Image) Sarah Vaughn and Jonathan Luna’s latest collaboration is a poetically paced deconstruction of “conquering queen” arcs in fantasy stories, especially Daenerys Targaryen’s in Game of Thrones. The issue opens up with a queen meeting a dragon in an almost beat for beat replay of the Game of Thrones Season 1 finale before cutting to the monotonous, terrible life of a worker that grows the crops that supports her army to conquer even more people for her “eternal” empire. Luna’s use of grids helps nail down the routine feeling of our protagonist’s life, and he switches up color gradients when she tries to run for it. There is lots of worldbuilding on the political, religious, and cosmological fronts, but Vaughn and Luna temper it with a hell of an escape plotline and clean artwork.
The Damned #1 (Oni Press) Confession: The Sixth Gun is one of those series I missed but always wanted to get into. So I was happy to see a new series by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt. The premise: Prohibition-era noir, with demons. Interesting enough (although the gangster thing is a bit played out for me, personally). But I found the debut issue muddled, with Bunn giving too much backstory and not enough information being revealed through the story action (a trick at which Chaykin, for example, excels). And I found Hurtt’s artwork is too cartoony to be really terrifying here. Overall: 6 Recommendation: Read
hings could be worse — Joshua Williamson could be writing it. He does, in fact, write this issue, and it’s loaded with painfully awkward and clunky dialogue that shouldn’t make it past an editor and makes a mockery of a Bruce-Wayne-meets-his-father scene that even a mildly competent author could wring some decent emotion out of. Throw in Jason Fabok’s dull-as-dry-toast “New 52”-style art, and you’ve got yet another incredibly lame chapter in the rancid “The Button” storyline. Overall: 2 Recommendation: Pass
being too dangerous to the world. As Kal El outlines all the casualties both men have suffered from the events in Injustice. Meanwhile, Harley Quinn is hiding out in Arrows former haven, when she gets arrested by Amanda Waller. By issue’s end, the reader and Harley is introduced to the Suicide Squad. Overall: 9 Recommendation: Buy