I'm a comic book reader. I don't buy a lot these days, to put it mildly, but I keep up with a reasonable amount of comics news online and get some collections via purchase or the library. So from time to time I'll get my geek on here.
Light Brigade, by Peter J. Tomasi, Peter Snejbjerg, and Bjarne Hansen, published by DC, $19.99 US.
This is fun.
Light Brigade is a mini-series set during the Battle of the Bulge—that's on the front line of the Allies' advance toward Germany in the astoundingly cold winter of 1944, at the point where a lot of American forces had gotten cut off by a German counter-offensive and were in imminent risk of being completely overwhelmed. Our protagonists are the members of an American company waiting for trouble and passing the time as best they can, when the anticipated German incursion begins. And so does the arrival of two falling angels.
From there things keep unfolding. This story includes Longinus (the centurion who pierced Jesus' side during his crucifixion and must now wait as long as it takes for Jesus' next coming), the last of the angels to mate with human women in pre-Flood times and some of the surviving half-angelic progeny of those unions, a zombie army with everything from Nazis back to Teutonic knights, and heroic sacrifices. It also has some surprisingly serious and mature talk about the problematic parts of dealing with incarnations of pure goodness in a world that really does have awful stuff in it, God's responsibility for the whole mess, and like that. Oh, and it also has the company comics geek who gets to be part of a band of super-heroes at last.
The mythology isn't anything original to someone who follows riffs like those in In Nomine, but then originality is overrated. What matters is how it works in practice, and Tomasi really pulls it together well. The story is very personal, with a sense of great stakes on various schedules. The fact that the grigori, the fallen angel, is the very last of his kind adds some poignancy to his struggle, and his relations with the nephilim, the half-angelic soldiers serving him, have a sense of mutual commitment in an almost feudal way. The grigori's a rotten bastard, but he's made promises that he intends to keep, and some of his tangled feelings toward God and what he wants out of God at this late date make very fine dramatic sense. There are other good touches all along the way, too.
It's not deep. It's got a bit more than would fit comfortably into a good movie by del Toro or someone like that. Maybe a four- or six-hour mini-series. But it's a ripping yarn that I enjoyed a lot, and that looked really good.
30 Days of Night,
30 Days of Night: Dark Days,
30 Days of Night: Return to Barrow,
30 Days of Night: Eben and Stella, and
30 Days of Night: Spreading the Disease, by Steven Niles and various artists, mostly Ben Templesmith, published by IDW, $17.99-19.99
This, unfortunately, is not so fun, because of two specific problems.
First the praise. Steve Niles has a glorious high concept here: vampires attack Barrow, Alaska, during the 30 days in November-December when the sun's below the horizon. We won't talk about the idea that European vampires never, ever thought of trying this in Scandinavia; that's just nit-picking. It's a rock-solid idea and the framework for its execution is thoroughly sound. For a story like this, you set up some interesting humans, work out a few conflicts for the vampires to have among themselves, wind it up, and let it go. To quote one of my favorite Stephen King lines, in
Danse Macabre:
Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood. Straub succeeds winningly at this, and the novel's machinery runs well (although it is extremely loud machinery; as already pointed out, that is also one of the great attractions of the gothic— it's PRETTY GODDAM LOUD!)
Indeed so. The question for the author of such a thing is whether they can crank it up to the right volume and kind of noise. And right at the outset, Niles and Templesmith roar out with great promise. But there are, like I said, problems.
First, in the writing. Niles sets up background involving humans spying on vampires and some implicit vampire society with its own internal dynamics, and then never resolves anything satisfactorily. Plot bits get left hanging at the end of each mini-series, complexities spiral up without obvious plan in each successive one, and there's less and less justification for calling any set of installments an actual
story. I remember when this same problem hit Dark Horse's Aliens mini-series back in the day, and later their Terminator mini-series as well. That original story by Mark Verheiden and Mark A. Nelson had a resolution; more or less nothing after it did. And 30 Days of Night as an ongoing series of works is right in the same morass.
This isn't itself fatal to my interest. I follow plenty of doomed-to-incoherence works. Nor is fatal that, as with Light Brigade, I recognize all kinds of inspirations and source material for the setting. What did kill my interest and reduce me to browsing through later volumes in the unfulfilled hope of something more interesting happening is just that I didn't find it very engaging.
This is where the second problem comes in. Templesmith is an interesting artist, but he can't or won't draw normal stuff well. His human beings aren't well differentiated and there are far too many details I'd have liked to see about Barrow that I never did. I came away with no good sense of the town's size or layout, or with a sense of (for instance) how a house weatherproofed to Barrow standards might differ in its appearance and quality of lighting from one down here in the Pacific Northwest. Some of the other artists are better, but it's persistently hard to tell what's supposed to be freakish in the eyes of observers in the story and what's just drawn that way.
I have to score this one as a reasonable success at the outset and each follow-up further from the mark.