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Monarch #1 is an impressive debut that builds a living, dangerous world with complex characters

Posted on February 8, 2023 by Ricardo Denis

I’m always wary of stories that feature kids as the main characters. I immediately think it’s going to be another coming-of-age story or a childhood trauma yarn that’ll follow the same old story beats as countless other works that go down similar routes. Not that they’re bad. They’re Just a bit overused, which often makes them predictable. Rodney Barnes and Alex Lins break away from this in their new series Monarch, openly resisting what’s been done before to explore ideas that might hit harder but that must be faced regardless.

Monarch follows Travon, an orphan living in Compton. His foster home seems like a good place and he’s surrounded by people that look out for him, an important factor considering other foster kids who’ve perhaps not been as lucky as him are out to violently bully him for having it marginally better than others.

As if things weren’t hard enough for Travon, aliens descend from the skies thirsty for blood and mayhem, looking like monsters that were exclusively bred to slaughter and maim indiscriminately in the worlds they’ve targeted for invasion. Travon must fight for his life and that of his surrogate family and friends, even if it requires sacrificing things that can’t ever be recovered.

Monarch sets the tone early with its relentless approach to violence. Lins captures both bully violence and alien aggression as things weighed by consequence, making them feel meaningful and necessary to the story rather than gratuitous. Travon’s living environment feels dangerous as a result, a symptom of the status quo, and it helps to build compelling characters that readers can worry about and fear for.

Barnes’ script leans on rawness to build its characters. Travon isn’t a Disneyfied version of a foster child. He’s a boy that is always aware of the hand he’s been dealt so he can never lose focus of the things that are important to him, like the people that have become family in the absence of blood relatives. Barnes makes it a point to present Travon as a survivor, a condition that might end up making him better suited than most to face down a scenario filled with vicious aliens given the things he’s had to live through at such an early age.

It’s in this arrangement that Barnes and Lins’ Monarch sets itself apart from other stories featuring coming-of-age themes and YA-like sensibilities. Nothing here is played safe or to keep readers in their comfort zones. Quite the opposite. Travon and his friends are all at risk of becoming just few more casualties of the invasion at any time. The prospect of that generates an overwhelming sense of tension that makes for compulsive reading.

Fans of the 2011 sci-fi horror film Attack the Block will find a similar appreciation for roughness in the storytelling process that makes Monarch such a hard-hitting experience. In it, a group of kids from South London (an historically underprivileged area) have to fight off malicious aliens and defend their home, dysfunctional and difficult though that place may be. The movie’s strengths lie in turning commonly overlooked characters (in this case, rowdy kids that fall into a life of crime given their circumstances) into protagonists that never shed their complexities. Monarch frames its story and its characters in a similar way, letting the harsh realities of life come along for the ride without feeling the need to soften them to make audiences more comfortable. You just have to embrace the conditions of Travon’s existence and feel them along with him.

Monarch #1 is an impressive debut that builds a living, dangerous world with complex characters that already carry a considerable amount of personal history with them. It’s impossible not to root for Travon and you will keep turning the pages with a certain reluctance for fear of what might happen to him throughout. But turn them you shall, and you won’t want to stop. Monarch is just that good.

Script: Rodney Barnes Art: Alex Lins Colors: Luis NCT
Story: 10 Art: 10 Overall: 10
Recommendation: Buy and check out Barnes’ Killadelphia if you haven’t already.

Image Comics provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review

Purchase: Zeus Comics – comiXology/Kindle

Early Review: Monarch #1 is an impressive debut that builds a living, dangerous world with complex characters

Posted on January 30, 2023 by Ricardo Denis

Script: Rodney Barnes Art: Alex Lins Colors: Luis NCT
Story: 10 Art: 10 Overall: 10
Recommendation: Buy and check out Barnes’ Killadelphia if you haven’t already.

Image Comics provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review

In shops February 8th

Movie Review: The Long Walk

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Ricardo Denis

It takes a delicate touch to cross genres, to marry them and then keep them in harmony to get at something different. Mattie Do’s The Long Walk achieves this in truly impressive ways, finding success in the subtleties of the horror and sci-fi genres she uses for her story rather than in their loudest components. The film—a Laotian production—truly is an achievement, and it does something movies in general should aspire to do more of: broaden the scope of storytelling.

The Long Walk is essentially a ghost story that’s in league with time travel. An old man (played by Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy) is followed around by a young female ghost (Noutnapha Soydara) that can take him fifty years into the past to when his mother died a slow a very painful death in their house in rural Laos. The old man starts interacting with his younger self (Por Silatsa) with good intentions at heart, but the consequences of meddling in one’s own past turn out to bear a high and strange cost.

It’s a slow burn of a story that gives viewers time to consider the old man’s actions, especially in how well-intentioned he seems to think they are. Given how heavily it focuses on the old man and his younger kid version, the experience is profoundly personal. The audience spends a lot of time with the character at his most intimate and it makes for a study that feels intensely raw but always honest.

It’s important to note that the movie offers no clear answers and offers no real path to judging its main character. As we become aware of what the old man’s intentions are, new questions start claiming their stake in the story, all while making the unique situation the character is in become progressively disturbing.

It’s fortunate, then, that the performances are so good. Chanthalungsy and Silatsa never stop being fascinating to watch. They make the most with the pacing of the story by taking their time to methodically develop the emotional arcs that get tangled together throughout the movie.

I appreciated how uncomplicated the whole time travel component was. There are no hard sci-fi concerns here regarding paradoxes or collapsing universes. A change in the past is a change in the present. What it all means, though, is where the game’s at. Mattie Do accentuates this visually with changes to the old man’s house as markers of time manipulation.

The house itself functions like a character in its own right, or an extension of the old man’s spirit and personality. We spend enough time in it to get a good sense of its secrets. Any change to the things in it are important, adding layers of consequence to the old man’s decisions.

There’s definitely more of an interest in the ghost part of the equation rather than the sci-fi one. If anything, the time travelling is more a means to an end, a vehicle for the ghost story to reach alternate destinations within the narrative. One thing that stuck out was the decision to set the story in a not too distant future. It takes an approach to the future much like the one the movie Logan (2017) takes with its focus on small futuristic leaps instead of full macro shifts in society. Technological progress is evident but measured.

The Long Walk’s Laos is not governed by holograms, lasers, or spaceships. Its sci-fi elements are in the little things, the kind that make a dent in everyday life. Watches, bank accounts, and other functions, for instance, are integrated into human bodies through chips and are displayed on the skin. Solar energy is forced unto the countryside as well, which frames technology as an imposition that threatens established ways of life that might not need the upgrade.

Mattie Do has put a very complex, unique, and important film out into the world. The Long Walk offers a flexible blueprint for new storytelling possibilities and it should be discussed for the things it does with the genres it plays with. If the future holds more movies like this, then horror and sci-fi will be ushered into a whole new age of story.

LILY C.A.T. celebrates its 35-year anniversary and it still shows we’ve much to learn from it

Posted on March 8, 2022 by Ricardo Denis

When I first started reading up on Lily C.A.T. online I came across a description of it that showed up way too often: an anime version of Alien (1979) where the monster is a cat. It doesn’t really do it justice.

The setup does resemble Alien in that it takes place in a spaceship and that there’s a foreign entity wreaking havoc on its crew. Its kind of science fiction, like Alien as well, leans more towards horror than actual sci-fi, but the movie is quick to shed that comparison in favor of something that mixes other classic movies in for a surprisingly deep story about time, the fear of becoming obsolete, and the dangers of progress. And yes, it does have a cat, but it’s no mere monster (although it can be quite frightening).

Lily C.A.T. is the creation of Hisayuki Toriumi, one of the minds behind the classic Gatchaman. Released in 1987, the movie, set in the 23^rd century, follows the men and women (and cat) of space cruiser Saldes, a ship that was hired out by the Syncam Corporation to take surveyors into a new planet with unique mining possibilities. The trip reaches its destination, but before the crew has the chance to get off the ship and survey the planet, strange deaths and disappearing corpses keep them in place until they can figure out what’s caused this nightmare scenario just as they reach the end of their first 20-year cryosleep journey.

In comes the cat, a creature that might be a clone or copy (or something else) of another cat that travelled with one of the crew members. Her name’s Lily and it’s quickly established something isn’t entirely feline underneath all her fur. It doesn’t take long for a hulking monster to reveal itself, it’s presence offering part of the explanation as to why the crew is being consumed and what the cat’s role is in all this.

One of the main attractors of the movie is Yoshitaka Amano’s character and creature designs. Amano, known for his work on Vampire Hunter D, Final Fantasy, and Speed Racer, creates a monstrous mass of horror that seems inspired more by John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) than H.R. Giger’s designs for Alien. It’s a brutal manifestation of hunger that holds a certain mystery as to its killing methods and why it consumes the bodies of those it kills.

This is where comparisons to Alien stop. As the ship’s crew starts to dig into the events that are taking place on the Saldes, character motivations and trust issues start revealing deeper concerns afflicting its crew. For a movie that’s just over an hour long, there’s a fair amount of existential dialogue taking place and they range from thoughts on humanity being overtaken by technology, ideas on how time becomes obsolete when travelling in space, and the importance of fulfilling one’s duty despite being presented with the possibility very little of it matters given the circumstances. Here it veers into 2001: A Space Odyssey territory.

As the movie progresses, it becomes evident that its central computer might be seeing the monster and its biochemical components as a rare find that could benefit the Syncam Corporation’s bottom line if brought back to Earth. The crew slowly realizes that their presence at this point is mostly superfluous given the computer is capable of navigating the ship by itself and of containing the creature to certain areas for a long trip back home with the new cargo.

The realization inspires the ship’s captain, Mike Hamilton (played by Mike Reynolds in the English dub version), to reexamine his decision to dedicate his life to space travel and he sacrificed in its pursuit. He goes on to provide one of the movie’s most existentially unsettling monologues. Hamilton speaks to the price space travelers pay in terms of time, framing it as a pursuit that is appreciated on a very lonely stage.

Undergoing twenty, thirty, or forty-year time jumps for deep space travel means those left behind continue aging naturally while the traveler artificially extends his or her life span. It means travelers sacrifice a lot for a system that, at the same time, is trying to eliminate human input entirely at every turn. The insight Captain Hamilton provides in his monologue allows for a more complex type of questioning when it comes to tried and true sci-fi tropes. It leaves an impression and promotes the further exploration of genre ideas that we’ve seemingly taken for granted way too often.

There’s a subplot concerning criminals that make their way into spaceships to go on illegal time jumps to avoid arrest for serious offenses. Again, time is a factor that puts into question the entire notion of duty, especially if we think about it as something that runs on an invisible timeline we’ve never thought necessary to consider before.

These and other variations on the sci-fi formula are what make Lily C.A.T. such an impressive and important example of classic anime. Toriumi’s vision considers a profound worry for the things humans sacrifice in service of progress, especially how our limited foresight can put us on a road towards obsolescence. The movie offers a warning that’s as prescient now as it was when it came out, perhaps more so given what’s come to pass since its original release. Give it a watch and don’t get too distracted by the cat. There are other things to worry about when humans venture deeper into space.

Review: Fear Case #1

Posted on February 4, 2021 by Ricardo Denis

Matt Kindt and Tyler and Hilary Jenkins are tapping into some True Detective vibes with Fear Case, the team’s new fantasy horror book for Dark Horse. To tie it only to that show, though, does a disservice to the range of ideas unleashed on this story. There’s a dark fantasy undercurrent to the plot that looks like it will grab hold as the comic progresses and there’s a Philip K. Dick reference in there that provides a big hint as to what’s coming. What’s certain is that this story has the potential to be among many ‘best of’ lists come year’s end.

Fear Case #1 focus on two Secret Service agents, one a New Age enthusiast with a love for speculative fiction (called Winters) and the other a more old-school agent that’s not keen on entertaining fantasies (called Mitchum). They’re on the last three weeks of a mysterious case assigned to them concerning a strange box that’s been seen in some of the world’s most enigmatic tragedies. It’s a case that’s eluded many other agents, driven some to madness even. It’s because of this that those who get the case have a one-year deadline to solve it, if they withstand it.

The setup is clean, enticing, and beautifully presented without really getting bogged down by insider shop talk, which tends to make reading procedurals and detective stories a bit cumbersome sometimes. Kindt’s dialogue smoothly transitions from light exposition to character development and it does look like one won’t overpower the other, something that tends to hound True Detective.

Tyler and Hilary’s art, an illustrator and colorist combo, keeps the tone dark and heavy but not to the point of making the book feel like a walk through hell to get at its mysteries. Their approach to tone is not meant to oppress the reader rather than to offer a counterbalance to Kindt’s lively and quick dialogue. They play off of each other nicely. It shows how synchronized this creative team is on this book.

The mystery behind the fear case has an air of conspiracy theory behind it, making the interaction between Winters and Mitchum unravel as a clash of worldviews. Winters indulges the more mystic elements of the case while Mitchum is willing to go beyond his comfort zone but only within reason. It’s a refreshing state of affairs that thankfully doesn’t result in the two characters sniping at each other from opposite extremes. They prefer the grey area, perhaps alluding to the possibility no clear answer will come from the case and that a lot will be left up to interpretation.

There’s enough in Fear Case’s first issue to justify following the series at a monthly basis. This is the kind of comic one desperately wants to continue reading once an issue is done. It just comes off as a very good pilot episode for a TV series, like the first episodes for Fringe and The X-Files. Much like those shows, Fear Case hooks you in immediately and I doubt you’ll put up much of a struggle given how good it is.

Script: Matt Kindt Art: Tyler Jenkins Color: Hilary Jenkins
Story: 9.0 Art: 9.0 Overall: 9.0 Recommendation: Buy and brush up on your Philip K. Dick

Dark Horse provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review

Purchase: comiXology – Kindle – Zeus Comics – TFAW

Review: Outer Darkness/Chew #1

Posted on March 8, 2020 by Ricardo Denis

There’s something special about crossovers between non-superheroes comics. Usually, a Marvel or DC crossover comes with expectations of event-like conflicts and big action set-pieces. Creator-owned crossovers, on the other hand, tend to live and die by the strength of their characters and the culture they carry from their own comics. This is definitely the case with Outer Darkness/Chew #1, from John Layman, Afu Chan, and Rob Guillory, a coming together of sci-fi, horror, and comedy of epic proportions from two books that rival each other in terms of the sheer storytelling madness they produce.

The comic starts with the crew of the Charon (from Outer Darkness) engaging with a Cibulaxian alien ambassador that only engages in conversation over food. No external communicator can help in the situation and the chef responsible for comms meets a gleefully violent and premature end early on. The captain of the Charon, Captain Rigg, is then forced to resort to plan B: traveling in time to bring Tony Chu in, a Cibopath that can dive into the memories of the things he eats (from Chew).

Outer Darkness/Chew #1 requires prior knowledge of both series to fully appreciate. Writer John Layman, who wrote both series, basically says as much in his letter to the fans at the end of the issue, when he talks about how the book approaches the Chew parts of the book as a kind of coda to the original series (which ran for 60 issues from 2009-2016).

From the Outer Darkness side of the equation, an understanding of the concept is pretty much all you need, which is basically made up of bits from The Exorcist, Star Trek, and Event Horizon. Honestly, I would recommend reading both series as they are very good on their own and are well worth the price of admission. Maybe then come back to the crossover.

The story succeeds in making both the Chewverse and the Outer Darknessverse converge as if they were naturally meant to since their inception. It even makes it a point to recognize changes in how the characters look within the story once they crossover.

Rob Guillory, co-creator of Chew, illustrates his part of the story in the original style of the book with Afu Chan, co-creator of Outer Darkness, doing the same. When Tony Chu is brought aboard the Charon, Afu Chan takes over and the characters acknowledge the change in their looks. They are baffled by it, even.

It’s a bit of meta that builds up the crossover quite well and makes each character recognize the distance between their realities. Chew characters transition well under Chan’s pencils and they still seem like they are from another place, which adds to the clash of stories between the two universes.

Layman’s script does a good job of balancing both worlds, especially in terms of tone. Outer Darkness is a more serious tale than Chew and yet they each keep their identities intact throughout the issue. One’s humor doesn’t drown out the other’s horror. This is something that rarely manages to carry over in this type of story, but Layman pulls it off. Let’s see if it manages to sustain itself over the entire arc.

There’s a lot to like about Outer Darkness/Chew #1, especially for fans of the two series. In fact, I’d say that’s precisely the audience it’s seeking. New readers will probably struggle a bit to make everything click, but there’re still enough things going on in the story that anyone could latch onto and follow. There’s just a lot of fun to be had here, and the promise of more Cibopaths in space is always a good thing.

Script: John Layman Art: Rob Guillory and Afu Chan
Story: 9 Art: 10 Overall: Buy and then read all of Chew

Image Comics provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review

Rosarium Launches New Campaign for Diverse Comics and Books

Posted on April 8, 2016 by theblerdgurl

Indie scifi novel and comic book publisher Rosarium Publishing announced this week that it is raising funds via crowdfunding to help pay for production of a minimum of 10 more titles this year. The campaign, entitled Rosarium Publishing: The Next Level, has set out to raise $40,000 on Indiegogo to cover the costs of offset printing and marketing of fiction in the science fiction, children’s, crime, steampunk, satire and comics genres.

Rosarium Publishing is an independently run, minority-owned publishing company specializing in speculative fiction, comics, satire and a touch of crime fiction. The company was founded in May 2013 by science fiction/fiction writer Bill Campbell with a focus on multicultural stories told from the voices of diverse artists. The publisher currently supports over 40 artists and writers from all over the world and currently has over 18 fiction novels and over 20 comic book titles. You can find Rosarium Publishing titles at Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, Comixology and PeepGame Comix. Bill Campbell had one goal when he started Rosarium: to bring true diversity to publishing so that the high-quality books and comics the company produces actually reflect the fascinating, multicultural world we truly live in today.

Bill Campbell – Founder, Rosarium Publishing

“I believe it’s imperative that people are able to tell their own stories. They can build their own tables rather than ask for a place at the table.” – Bill Campbell, founder, Rosarium Publishing

Rosarium has grown from a company of one to a full roster of over 40 artists and writers of different nationalities, genders, orientations and religious beliefs. From a story about a day walking vampire bitten as a slave to science fiction stories told by Latin American protagonists to a Southeast Asian Steampunk anthology to an anthropomorphic retelling of the Iranian revolution as told by a fish, Rosarium is redefining diversity in literature by simply publishing well-written stories, with stunning artwork by people who reflect the identities and cultures of the larger population.

In just 3 short years, Rosarium has been able to produce several critically-acclaimed projects such as Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, The SEA Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia and APB: Artists against Police Brutality. Rosarium titles are a being read in high school and college classrooms across the country and the company has been mentioned, reviewed, and featured in literary publications such as Publishers Weekly, Chicago Tribune, Library Journal, Locus, Boston Globe, Washington Post, countless websites and blogs as well as The New York Times. Projects such as the indie comic DayBlack and the crime novel Making Wolf have also won literary awards. Rosarium has been able to accomplish all this through hard work, fan support and print-on-demand.

Now it’s time to Level up.

Print-On-Demand is the choice for many indie publishers starting out that can’t afford the upfront investment of printing, have low print runs or are looking for distribution. Rosarium, whose books are now distributed to bookstores by IPG, now has the opposite problem. They have been so successful that demand has now dictated that a switch to offset printing is more cost effective. Bu the company has to foot that bill themselves. If the Rosarium Publishing: The Next Level Indiegogo campaign is successful, the company will be able to print thousands of books and continue their mission to further their quest for diversity in publishing with the high-quality work they are known for.

So Rosarium’s fate is really up to us, the fans, those of us who want to keep seeing diverse characters in comics and fiction. Those of us that understand that diversity doesn’t mean just adding one Black guy to a storyline, it’s up to us, the people that are interested in reading stories written by marginalized voices, to support this project and this indie company.

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To contribute to the Rosarium Publishing: The Next Level Campaign go to http://bit.ly/rosariumpub

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@theblerdgurl is a commercial film/video editor by day and comic book reading, anime watching, TV live tweeting, K-Pop listening, blog writing, geek gurl by night. She is on a mission to shine a light on indie, female and comic artists of color and highlights them and their work on her blog theblerdgurl. She currently lives in a century old brownstone in Brooklyn with 2 cats who plot her demise daily. You can also find her on twitter, facebook, instagram and tumblr.