Just Like Clinton & Bush

Joe Harris & Colin Lorimer “Millennium” (IDW, 2015)

The first thing that you need to know is that this is a crossover between the X-Files & the Millennium spinoff.  There’s a cursory attempt to remind you of some plot points, but basically if you haven’t watched the shows, you’re going to be lost right out of the gate.

Are you still with me? If you’re someone like me who watched both shows (& the occasional rerun), then you’ll be good to go, even if you haven’t seen any recently or read any of the comics.

The plot really isn’t that important here.  It’s more about the various characters and the tone.  Harris does a great job of replicating the dark paranoid tone of the Millennium series.

Colin Lorimer has an unenviable task – he has to reproduce images of actors that we watched on our televisions for many many nights.  Fortunately he does a fine job.  All the characters are identifiable as the characters that we know, while the action is clear and understandable at all times.

I enjoyed Millennium, but would hesitate to recommend it to anyone who wasn’t familiar with the TV shows.

The World is Stranger Than We Think

Nalo Hopkinson “Falling In Love With Hominids” (Tachyon, 2015)

Here in Derby City, people are getting ready for fall.  School is starting and people are acting like Halloween is just around the corner.  And Nalo Hopkinson releases this volume of collected short stories.  I’m glad that I had the opportunity to read these stories in the midst of the summer, because that’s what they call out for.

Some of the stories are explicitly set on Islands.  But throughout all of them, there’s a sense of an island breeze.  Caribbean culture is the backbone of the worlds that she creates.

Don’t get me wrong.  This isn’t some sort of Jimmy Buffet style mellow everythings gonna be alright view of island life.  There are dark deeds and sometimes scary things in the shadows.  And sometimes the things we need to fear are other people.  

This is my first opportunity to read Hopkinson’s fiction, and I have to say that I’m a fan.  It seems to occupy a space that’s part SF, part fantasy.  I’d recommend this to fans of Jeff Vandermeer, for example.  Extremely well written pieces that seem to slide around and hit the sweet spot.

Fists Like Iron!

Iron Fist Epic Collection: The Fury of Iron Fist (Marvel, 2015)

This is grindhouse comics at their best!

Straight out of the 70s it’s Danny Rand, master of the “Iron Fist”, in NYC, looking for revenge and later trying to be a hero. Crazy action with nepharious billionaires, gimmicky fighters, ninjas, & more!  

Several things jumped out at me: first, you have to acknowledge the problematic nature of the white explorer finding the mystical Asian city trope.  And of course, this white kid is the best at what they do.  That’s a problem.  (I’m interested in seeing what the new TV series does with this.) But hey, there’s a very diverse assortment of characters.  We meet Colleen Wing & her dad, Professor Wing.  Colleen is Japanese, so she’s got ninja skills, not to mention that she mind melds with Danny fairly early on in the series.  So she’s more or less his best friend. We also get to spend time with Misty Knight, former cop turned private detective with a robot arm.  Yeah, it’s that kind of a series.

Keep in mind that this is a mainstream comic from the 70s, so the storytelling is much more episodic that you might expect.  But it’s a hell of a lot of fun.