What is a Short Pants Review? While we’d love to give full reviews to everything, there just isn’t enough time in the day. So we’ve come up with Short Pants as a way of providing capsule reviews from our varied review writers, giving quick hits and short capsule thoughts about various comics we’ve read recently.

This time out, Dave and Randy cover Conan the Cimmerian #0, BPRD: The Ectoplasmic Man, Hulk #4, Immortal Iron Fist #16, Indiana Jones Adventures Vol. 1 TP, Magdalena/Daredevil, Man With No Name #2, Pilot Season: Alibi, Thunderbolts #121, Transformers Spotlight: Wheelie and X-Men First Class Vol. 2 #13.

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Writer: Garth Ennis
Artist: John McCrea
Company: DC Comics

When Garth Ennis writes superheroes, his instinct is to take the piss out of ‘em - sometimes by taking a piss on them. That was literally the case in an issue of Hellblazer he wrote where a drunken John Constantine accidentally took a leak on the Phantom Stranger’s boots. Then there was the time Ennis had the Punisher blow Wolverine’s ‘nads off. And back in the 90s when Hitman was being published, he even had his titular character spew chunks on Batman.

Bit of a schoolboy, that Garth.

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Writer: Dwayne McDuffie
Artist: Scott Kolins
Company: Marvel Comics

I’ve always had a soft spot for the 80s miniseries Secret Wars. Sure, it had some silly moments from writer Jim Shooter, but any sillier than Shooter’s other Marvel work? Not appreciably. And yeah, the premise might’ve been cribbed from that Star Trek where the aliens want to see if good is stronger than evil by making Kirk and Abe Lincoln fight Genghis Khan and a Klingon, but…well…the cool moments were worth it! Hulk hefting a mountain range! Ben Grimm playing pattycake with the Lizard! Wolverine casually lopping off the Absorbing Man’s arm! And I’ll even vouch Continue Reading »

Writer: Alan Moore
Artist: Melinda Gebbie
Company: Top Shelf

A few months back, legendary cartoonist John Byrne called me a “complete asshole” for wanting to read Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls (it happened here). I wasn’t taken aback. Byrne’s infamously cranky and took issue with Lost Girls being an explicitly sexual story featuring characters from kids’ lit, including one whose rights aren’t public domain in the UK. That last item’s a purely legal matter, irrelevant to the book’s quality. As to whether it’s beyond the pale for the heroines of Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland to engage in fictional sexploits, I say poppycock. Continue Reading »

Writer/Artist: Eric Shanower
Company: IDW Publishing

Everyone’s seen MGM’s classic Wizard of Oz musical, right? Lesser known is the fact that Frank Baum, author of the book on which the movie was based, would go on to write 13 sequels to his original story between 1904 and 1920. The 1985 movie Return to Oz (starring a pre-scary Fairuza Balk) was an amalgamation of two of those books, but put off audiences with a decidedly scary tone not present in the books. That same year, Eric Shanower published the first in a series of five Continue Reading »

Writer: Greg Pak
Artist: Nigel Raynor
Company: Dynamite Entertainment

There’s a problem with the new Battlestar Galactica comic: it doesn’t look like Battlestar Galactica. Just take a peek at that first page. With its gaudy, oversaturated colors and exaggerated faces, it hardly speaks to the weighty realism that defines Ron Moore’s TV show. Greg (Planet Hulk) Pak’s writing goes a considerable way towards capturing the voices of the characters, but it’s an uphill battle, weighed down by art that’d be more appropriate for a Spawn spin-off. Continue Reading »

Writer/Artist: Chester Brown
Company: Drawn & Quarterly

Canadian frontier history. Not what you’d expect to inspire some of the best comics of the last few years, but there’re at least two bookend works I count among my favorites. First is Northwest Passage, a two-fisted actioneer from Oni that uses history as its launching point, then filters it through the same lens of myth we Americans view our “Old West.” Notably more grounded in history, Chester Brown’s Louis Riel recounts the revolutionary doings of a charismatic 19th century Canadian of Métis (mixed Indian and white) ancestry. Bold but flawed, and even possessed of delusions of religious Continue Reading »

Writer: Brad Meltzer
Artist: Ed Benes
Company: DC Comics

I’m about to say some nice things about this book, and I do so knowing full well I may end up wanting to axe-murder it halfway through the run. Because that’s how things went down with Brad Meltzer’s last contribution to the DC Universe, Identity Crisis. Meltzer opened strong with a tightly-plotted mystery that got inside the heads of DC’s heroes and villains better than any new writer in ages. He showed deep knowledge of DC’s rich history, and had a dramatic, confident authorial voice. He THEN spiraled off into a subversion of DC’s heroes, bad plot twists Continue Reading »

Writers/Artists: Gabriel Hernandez, Greg Ruth and Scott Morse
Company: Scholastic Graphix

I never read any of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books for pre-teens, but I was managing a Toys ‘R’ Us back when every kid did. I figured the books for formulaic, disposable fare, even if it was nice to see kids reading anything, so I approached Scholastic’s new series of Goosebumps comic adaptations with a touch of skepticism. Sure, I expected them to look good, with cartoonists like Greg Ruth (Freaks of the Heartland) and Scott Morse (Spaghetti Western) onboard, but I hardly expected the horror fan in me to find anything worthwhile.

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