Oh, yeah, like Image Comics would drop their calling card just like that.
With story and art by Jimmie Robinson and colors by Paul Little, the latest Bomb Queen mini-series opens with a quote from Malcolm X, "The future belongs to those who prepare for it today." The world's changed a great deal as we leap to 2112. A group of people are using their 'connected'/'jacked' selves to go the nuclear dumb that now is New Port City. It plays like one of those space shuttles that you can buy a ride on.
There they search out the monks in charge of the National Underground Library -- books have been made illegal and all public libraries closed. The monks have actually lured the four too this area. They have a plan to destroy the connected/jacked-in world and return to the Luddite world. They have Bomb Queen's prototype and are going to unless it into the digital world.
B-b-but she destroyed the real world! She'll likely do the same to the digital world!
Exactly.
Meanwhile Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips continue Criminal's "The Last Of The Innocent." How far will Riley go to get the life he felt he should have had in high school? Even lower as he ensures that his best friend dies so that his own happiness continues.
Something's dying in Cobra's seventh issue -- a storyline -- but at least the issue has Antonio Fuso's artwork. The strong, independent visual style goes a long way towards making this stale retread seem fresh. You've seen it all before if you've seen The Rookie, or Stakeout or any of the movies where an old geezer like Robert Duvall shows up to mid-wife the birth of Tom Cruise into manhood. The twist here is that the man is a woman. With shocking white hair! If that underwhelms you, we feel your boredom. Cobra has grown-up art but continues to rely upon the tiredest writing.
Wonder Woman continues to be one of the most inventive comic around. Fresh off the series where Diana had to go hand-to-hand with War, the latest continuing storyline picks up immediately after where Diana has become a god. The Amazons of Paradise Island are not happy and feel abandoned as Diana's been whisked away to be with Hermes and other Gods. It is there that Queen Hippolta -- Diana's mother -- tells her the truth.
The latest storyline trashes the old origin plot where the Queen fashions a daughter out of Clay. (In this issue, three, the other Amazons sneeringly refer to Diana as "Clay.") It turns out that Hippolta and Zeus had a passionate affair which she ended when she became pregnant. If anyone knew of the pregnancy (even Zeus), Hippolta feared Hera would find out and kill Diana.
Diana returns to the Amazons and tells them not to call her Clay or Diana. She is Wonder Woman; thereby kicking off Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang's latest long running storyline.
While Image Comics already has Bomb Queen but Chalres Soule and Renzo Podesta are giving them another strong title to boast about (cover by W. Scott Forbes) Twenty Seven. A male singer and guitar player makes a deal with the God of Fame and hopes for all to be wonderful. But eighties one-hit wonder Valerie has plans of her own, including killing eleven of her fellow one-hit wonders as a sacrifice to Fame in order to get back what she briefly had.
