No comments about Marvel Illustrated - Homer's The Iliad #3 (Marvel Comics).

No comments about Justice League of America #12 : Monitor Duty.

No comments about Batman / Lobo - Deadly Serious #1 & #2 (Dc Comics) (Batman Lobo, vol 1).

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2 comments about Anita Blake Vampire Hunter - Guilty Pleasures #1 (Marvel Comic Book 2007).

1. Laurell K. Hamilton might be unwilling to go back to the glory days of Anita Blake, but fans can re-experience how great things were at the beginning with the first issue in the Dabel Brothers' 12-part adaptation of the first novel, "Guilty Pleasures," for Marvel, which is being scripted by Stacie M. Ritchie with artwork by Brett Booth. Our penguin-loving heroine has already made her reputation as "The Executioner," sanctioned by the government to kill vampires in a world where vampires are were-creatures are now legal U.S. citizens with constitutional rights and social security numbers that will apparently never be recycled. Anita's day job is as an animator for Animator, Inc., raising the dead for profits more than fun in the great St. Louis area. She also works with the local Preternatural Squad (a.k.a. the Spook Squad) as an expert on vampires and other supernatural beings.
   
   "Guilty Pleasures" begins with Anita being approached to investigate some murders. Four vampires have been slaughtered in the new vampire club district (vampires are very entrepreneurial) and in a way she is already working on the case since she is giving the police al the help she can. But Anita does not work for vampires. Then Anita goes to a surprise bachelorette party for her friend Catharine Maison at Guilty Pleasures, a vampire strip club, run by the master vampire Jean-Claude. Suffice it to say that things do not go well in this opening chapter. What you have here is most exposition, but which might be problematic since you would expect that the vast majority of readers who pick up this comic book are going to be die-hard fans of the series. But neophytes will be able to get up to speed and the rest of us can revel in taking an illustrated walk down memory lane to the first time we read one of these books and became hooked. No matter how much disdain we might have for the current course of the series as it wallows more in soft-core sex than hard-core horror, our affection for those first Anita Black novels has not dimmed.
   
   Ritchie does an excellent job of sticking not just to Hamilton's plot, but her dialogue as well. In an interview Ritchie reported that: "Ms. Hamilton has all final say on character designs, art, and the scripts. She is very active in making sure that her universe is conveyed correctly." Booth, best known for his work on "Backlash" at the Wildstorm Studios, has a style that is well suited to the world of Anita Black, although he has to make some alterations in Anita Blake's hairstyle to desl with all those curls (one of which will apparently alwys curl down on her forehead between her eyes). Fortunately Anita's skin does not stay as white as it is early on in this first issue, and if you see some of the covers of other issues know that the vampires do not have the alabaster white skin you see with Jean-Claude on the cover of #2.
   
   The contract between Dabel Brothers and Hamilton is for the first five Anita Blake books, so after "Guilty Pleasures" we can look forward to "The Laughing Corpse)," "Circus of the Damned," "The Lunatic Cafe," and "Bloody Bones." Of course we will have to wait to see if Booth hangs around to do the artwork as long as Ritchie writes the adaptations. Hamilton apparently cleared Ritchie for the project, so my assumption would be she will script all five, but what do I know? At this point I just want Ritchie and Booth to stick around for the second novel, "The Laughing Corpse," because the end game of that one is my favorite of the Anita Blake novels and I want to see how Booth illustrates the scene that I always thought would make a movie version end up with an X-rating for violence and not sex.
   
   Shown above is the wrap around cover of Anita in a graveyard with a whole lotta zombies coming out of the ground of the front, underscoring that she might be called a Vampire Hunter but in these books she makes her living as an animator, with the back adding a passel of were-animals to the proceedings. The second printing offers a variant cover depicting Anita by herself, dressed in black including a t-shirt that proclaims "Zombies are cool" around the figure of a zombie penguin (a version of the original cover serves as the back cover). The variant cover for the third printing is one of the dancers at Guilty Pleausres with long blonde hair, but there is also a Greg Horn 1/10 variant cover of Anita with gun drawn and a Booth sketch of Anita for a special New York Comics Convention version cover. I actually like the second printing cover a bit more because it fits it better with the other covers, at least for the six issues that have been printed to date, because with one exception they have all been similar in featuring one character (the cover of #2 is the poster of Jean-Claude that is available).



2. Once upon a time, before the Anita Blake series became cheap porn with well-endowed vampires and werethingies, there was "Guilty Pleasures."
   
   And like many a successful fantasy/horror novel before it, Laurell K. Hamilton's breakout story has been adapted into graphic novel form. But the first issue of "Guilty Pleasures" comes across as a goth teen's daydreams -- lots of vampiric manflesh and a superpowerful, sulky heroine.
   
   As the story opens, necromancer Anita Blake is rejecting a sleazy vampire's request that she act as a private investigator for the vampires. On a seemingly unrelated note, a coworker then asks her another pal out to a bachelorette party -- which turns out to be at Guilty Pleasures, a vampire strip club run by the prissy-looking vampire Jean-Claude.
   
   Anita briefly departs the scene to assist the police -- an eviscerated body has been found in the graveyard, and obviously ghouls are responsible. But when she returns to Guilty Pleasures, she finds that things have turned nasty -- someone is having her mind controlled by a potentially deadly vampire...
   Yeah, it SOUNDS interesting. But somehow Laurell K. Hamilton and Brett Booth manage to whip this into a big mass of campy mediocrity, in which not much happens. At all. Seriously, we have about two pages of murder investigation, an office consultation, and the rest of it is brooding, seminude men showing off their chests.
   
   It doesn't help that the whole thing is horribly scripted -- an entire half page is devoted to Anita lying in bed, listening to the phone ring. Wow, that was exciting. When she isn't navel-gazing about her job and sleep cycles, she's usually exchanging lame "seductive" dialogue with Jean-Claude.
   
   The art, which Hamilton apparently oversaw, makes the whole drippy stew even worse -- lots of giant thighs, skintight pants, weird expressions, and squiggling curly hair in people's faces. Jean-Claude and Anita are both apparently supposed to be imposing and dangerous, but the former looks like a pouty vampire who looks like he's on his way to a lace-tatting convention.
   
   Interestingly, as the love interest, he also looks like a male version of Anita, who has albino skin, snakey curls, giant thighs, and collagen lips about to overload. According to this, she's an imposing, tough woman-of-action, but she seems more like a sulky, snotty Mary Sue with too much makeup.
   
   Don't expect much actual action in "Guilty Pleasures #1" -- expect a lot of dull exposition, posing and pouting, seminude men, and occasionally some nasty vampires.

2 comments about The Comic Book Heroes: From the Silver Age to the Present.

1. To Jacobs and Jones, the real "comic book heroes" are the artists, writers and editors who created the grand adventures and heroes. While they acknowledge that comics have historically led to tragedy for their creative people, they show how real-world heroes like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Steve Gerber, Carmine Infantino and many others endured tragedy to create memorable heroes and stories. It is an essential work for anyone interested in popular culture, as entertaining to read as it is informative. Note: Gerald Jones is currently revising and updating this book for a release sometime in the next two years - but this book is so satisfying you shouldn't wait.



2. It may not be of much interest to casual readers, but to longtime fans, I couldn't recommend this book enough. It doesn't just sit on my shelf, I've reread it dozens of times because the intimate details it contains on this often misunderstood industry are priceless. Of particular interest to me were the sections on the 70s, the beginning of fandom, the evolution of characters, and the pop culture phenomenon as we know it taking shape. It's simply amazing, as though Jones and Jacobs are sitting right there with you recounting these stories. Even as someone who's loved every aspect of comics since before I could read, I was still surprised by all the drama that was going on behind the scenes during these years of entertainment I have fond rememberances of. If there's a flaw, it's that the authors sound a little bitter at times, but that's because they were there in the thick of it during much of the time that this all occured.

No comments about Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic #26 : Vector Part Two (Dark Horse Comics).

No comments about Violator #1 : The World Part 1 (Image Comics).