Pre-empting Saturday Night Showcase this week because it’s Free Comic Book Day! I live-tweeted the comics I picked up this year and this is my wrap-up of those tweets. I ended up getting most of what I wanted, only missing out on The Smurf and a preview of the biographical graphic novel I Am Stan Lee. I looked at a few others, including Animal Castle from my initial want list, but nothing else really got my attention.
And to prove I’m no hypocrite I bought something to thanks the store for taking part in the event. I needed more boards and bags anyway, but I also saw a recent reprint of Detective Comics #38. I’ll review that in place of The Blue Beetle on Saturday because more than one Golden Age anthology will eat my time like a starving Pac-Man. So with that, let’s get started with my Free Comic Book Day haul via Twitter:
An anthology of three stories, all giving a kid-friendly but not kid-targeted makeover of what you expect out of 2000AD. The first story is “Harlem Heroes”, about a group of aeroball players whose training arena is actually a death trap because it’s till 2000AD. I do like how the kids use their brains to get out of the traps. Not something I’d read regularly but a fun little story.
The second follows thief Pandora Perez in the story “Pandora Perfect”. She just escaped prison thanks to her robot pal Gort and now needs to find the key to the shackle before it blows her leg off. It’s a good introduction to the character and her pocket dimension bag full of items…if she can ever find the right one. The inventor’s kids want to get back at their parents for leaving them behind while they go to a party and help to steal the key, which is not a good lesson for kids, but all-ages or not it’s still 2000AD.
The last one is a preview for “Full Tilt Boogie”, and the only one I ‘d consider checking out past this. A mercenary and her mom (and her cat with a dimension portal in his stomach) rescue a prince from debtor’s prison planet, but it’s not the queen that hired her but a crazy fangirl, so he might be better off in the prison as the guard chase them to a planet that is controlled by a killer computer and his ninja girl partner? It’s the fun kind of crazy. So overall a fun trio of tales but this is the only one that got my attention.
This comic has two stories and I do plan to do a deeper review of all of these in the future, possibly after the Tandy Computer Whiz Kids finishes up on Monday. The modern story has elements of the origin of the classic Crimebuster. The modern story has a kid named Chuck trying to find his mother, who he’s sure is not dead. This allies him with another kid in the orphanage named Swoop and a pair of junior superheroes, Gee-Gee (for “girl genius”) and Giant Lad, who aren’t very good at maintaining their secret identities. It also introduces a new version of Crimebuster’s monkey and the villain at the end looks like the villain more prominent in the classic origin, Iron Jaw. The classic version is a Nazi apparently. Like I said, fuller review at a later date but this was pretty good. It’s one I wouldn’t mind looking into.
A comic I compared to later Walter Lantz stuff. Kotto is a parrot living in Puerto Rico in this anthro world. The main story has Kotto and friends out camping when they encounter their own version of Bigfoot—who gives makeovers. Sure, why not? I wasn’t laughing hard or anything but I was very much amused. It’s a good comic.
This is a preview for a Netflix animated series and it kind of makes me wish I had Netflix. Years after a human was chosen to operate a “robo mech” by the alien mech itself the Sky Corp has been training the next generation of pilots, but one of the robots this year chooses someone outside the Corp. I liked this story and it definitely looks like my kind of show. Sorry I won’t be able to watch it.
There’s two stories in this one. Interestingly, the first story is the shorter story. I only know Juri from the advertisements for the game, and I don’t know Kimberly at all. I like Kimberly better because she’s the artist and Juri’s the jerk, attacking her in a case of misunderstanding and just being obnoxious. It’s the closest thing to being a Street Fighter story that this book has.
The other features a police officer and a mercenary, both protecting a not-America land and working together to protect artifacts from rebels. (I want to say somewhere near Napal but it’s a fictional country, like Shadaloo.) It’s not very Street Fighter to me. No chi/ki attacks, no actual fighting in the streets, only one martial arts move in the whole story, but beyond that it’s a good story of two people forced to work together and finding common ground while chasing the artifact smugglers. I did enjoy it.
So that’s my overall take on this year’s BW Free Comic Book Day. I only missed two comics but the five I picked up I actually enjoyed. I call that a win. I hope yours turned out as satisfying. I’ll go over these comics in more detail soon in “Yesterday’s” Comic, or I guess this would be Today’s Comic since they’re new.
BW Media Spotlight 