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Review: MPH by Mark Millar and Duncan Fegredo

Mark Millar is one of my favorite current comic book writers. The Scottish scribe (born 1969) always comes up with promising high concepts that deliver most of the time. Millar is the co-creator behind titles such as Kick-Ass (which I reviewed earlier), Wanted, The Secret Service and Marvel’s Civil War. If some titles sound familiar to you that may be because most of his creator-owned series have been adapted for the silver screen or will be in the near future.

mph-coverMPH is a five-part limited series recently collected in one trade paperback published by Image Comics under Millar’s own label Millarworld. The science fiction comic revolves around Roscoe, a 19 year-old drugs runner that hopes to get out of the slums of Detroit and build himself a business. During a drug deal Roscoe gets busted and goes to jail. He’s a model prisoner, counting on his good behavior to reduce his sentence. However, when Roscoe discovers he’s been framed, he takes a special drug he has been offered. This special drug, called MPH, gives Roscoe the power to move really fast. While under the influence of the drug, it seems time and everyone else stands still which makes escaping the high guarded prison easy.

Roscoe, together with his best friend, his girlfriend, and her younger brother decide to use the remaining pills to rob as many banks as possible. This isn’t just their ticket out of the slums of Detroit, it is also their way of getting back at the bankers and other bastards that bankrupted the city in the first place: ‘We knew it was wrong but it felt so good to pick the pockets of all of those fat cats that crippled Detroit. The banks that stopped our lines of credit, the crooked politicians that sold us down the river, the car companies that outsourced jobs and left us with nothing but drugs and American Idol. They took us from being an industrial powerhouse to half the city upping and leaving us with over eighty thousand empty buildings. It’s only right we got a little payback for those three generations of corruption and neglect,’ are Roscoe’s thoughts on their actions. And really, who could blame them?

By anchoring MPH in contemporary America, in which a lot of regular folks are crippled financially by the economic crisis, Millar not only tells a relevant story, he also writes characters whose motives are understandable and hard to argue with, especially when the thieves act like modern-day Robin Hoods and start to distribute part of their takings amongst the poor and jobless.

Of course, there’s trouble on the horizon: not only will they run out of pills, the teens will also have to fight Uncle Sam and a mysterious guy who seems to know an awful lot about the drugs and Roscoe and his partners. I don’t want to spoil the story too much, so let’s just say Millar has some nice twists and turns in store before this adventure comes to a well-rounded end.

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British artist Duncan Fegredo is MPH‘s co-creator and delivers realistic and vibrant art for the comic. Fegredo really gets across the contrast between the fast-moving thieves and the world around them, which is not an easy feat in a medium consisting of static images.

MPH reads like a fast-moving and very enjoyable movie, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we can revisit these characters in the cinemas soon.

This review was written for and published on the wonderful blog of the American Book Center.

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Review: Trees by Warren Ellis and Jason Howard

Trees, volume 1: In Shadow by Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, The Authority) and Jason Howard is something else. Trees is a great science fiction story that presents a new perspective on the theme of alien-invasion. Like all good science fiction, Trees is an exploration of human nature in alienating and trying circumstances.

Trees_vol1-coverTen years ago we discovered there is intelligent life in the universe: large black obelisks came down from the sky and landed on different places on earth. These big shapes wrecked their surroundings wherever they landed, destroying whole city blocks. Humanity panicked, but ‘the trees’ as people call them all but ignored humans all together. They don’t recognize us as intelligent or alive. Basically they just stand there, sometimes dumping toxic waste on their surroundings.

Now, ten years later, people have accepted these ‘trees’ and life goes on as well as possible. Writer Warren Ellis focuses on five locations on earth to show how the presence of the trees has changed our lives and how people adapted to them. In China a young artist arrives in the special cultural zone of a city under a tree and starts a journey of self-discovery. In Italy a young woman under protection of her boyfriend, the leader of a fascist gang that rules the city, meets an older man who will teach her survival skills so she can move up the social ladder. In Svalbard, one of the members of a research team is about to discover that the trees may not be dormant after all. The Somalian president starts placing artillery on the trees to demonstrate his military power, and in New York a Democrat is running for mayor in a city that’s been utterly transformed when the trees landed – Manhattan flooded when the trees landed on the cityscape.

Panel from Trees by Warren Ellis and Jason Howard.
Panel from Trees by Warren Ellis and Jason Howard.

In the first eight comics that are collected in Trees, Volume one: In Shadow, Ellis focuses most on the young artist, the Italian woman and the research team. Rightly so, because these three storylines concentrate on the characters and their development, whereas the other plotlines are more concerned with the politics of a world covered by the trees. At the moment they seem less interesting than the more personal storylines, but my guess is the political issues will be explored in later comic book issues.

I especially liked the story about Tian Chenglei, the young artist who is the new arrival in the city of Shu, a special cultural zone in China. Chenglei tries to find his place within a community of free thinkers, artists, homosexuals and transgenders and starts to explore his own sexuality.

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Jason Howard‘s artwork has an energetic feel to it. Howard’s love for cross-hatching gives the art a sketchy kind of look, while at the same time he gives a detailed impression of the scenery. All major locations in the book have their own distinctive look and feel, and these settings really sell the story. For the facial expressions Howard seems to use a sort of short-hand: they sometimes are lacking subtlety.

At first glance the cover of Trees reminded me of the film poster of David Lynch’s Eraserhead with Jack Nance wearing that goofy haircut, but although the trees are weird, Ellis’s story isn’t as strange as any of Lynch’s films. Trees isn’t less fascinating, though.

This review was written for and published on the wonderful blog of the American Book Center.

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Review: Umbral by Antony Johnston and Christopher Mitten

Sometimes you just don’t ‘click’ with a story and for me this is the case with Umbral, Book One: Out of the Shadows, a so-called dark fantasy story that takes place in the fictional Kingdom of Fendin, a world in which magic and religion are forbidden.

The story is about a young thief named Rascal. During an eclipse she sneaks into the Red Palace and tries to steal a priceless royal gem called the Oculus. She gets help from Arthir, the crown prince. Together they witness the horrific murder of the King and Queen at the hands of the Umbral: nightmarish, Lovecraftian creatures from another dimension. When the creatures kill the young boy as well, Rascal can barely escape the palace alive. With the Oculus in her possession Rascal tries to flee and outrun the Umbral. Interestingly, the Umbral are able to take on the shape of the people they’ve killed, making it hard to figure out whom to trust. On the way, Rascal gets help from a drifter named Dalone, who might be a wizard of sorts.

Page from Umbral, Book One: Out of the Shadows.
Page from Umbral, Book One: Out of the Shadows.

I’ll admit: I’m not a big fantasy buff, but as a reviewer I’m willing to try and read any comic that I come across. I thought the cover of the comic looked intriguing. Speaking of the interior art by Christopher Mitten, I have mixed feelings. On the positive side, I like the look of the Umbral. With their dark and shadowy form, bright red eyes and large mouth with sharp teeth they indeed seem to be creatures that will devour you in your nightmares. Storytelling-wise, Mitten is all over the place and from a visual standpoint the narrative flow feels a bit disjointed at times. It also doesn’t help that some of the characters look alike a lot and are hard to tell apart. For instance, Dalone and Master Gearge, master of the thieves’ guild, could have been twins. They’re both big-bearded men and father figures to Rascal.

UMBRALVOL1_coverOf course it is nice that the main character is female, and a teenager at that. But Rascal is a young, spunky girl with a potty mouth that frankly isn’t very interesting as a character. Nor are most of the other characters, to be honest. As a whole, Umbral Book One is pretty bland. It seems writer Antony Johnston (The Fuse, Wasteland, Dead Space) put some familiar tropes of the fantasy genre in a blender and this is what he came up with, throwing a bunch of ghost pirates in the mix as well.

Reader be warned: this first volume ends with a annoying ‘to be continued’ sign, so after almost 170 comic pages of chasing, cursing and violence, nothing really gets resolved. To be honest, I don’t think I can muster the enthusiasm to pick up the recently-published second installment of the story.

This review was written for and published on the wonderful blog of the American Book Center.