Easy Forbidden Solo

Some quick reviews before bed:

The latest SOLO is, no offense to Darwyn Cooke, the strongest offering yet in this unusual series. Howard Chaykin serves up six strong stories, staying mostly away from the sex to instad focus on his other abiding interests, history, rebels, and racism. I suppose most are fairly superficial by the end, having to wrap up in eight pages with jokes or ironic twists, but they still work well. The best is the last, "Horrors", which is the most personal, basically a snapshot of Chaykin's early days.

Forbidden #0 by Samuel Vera and Anibal Arroyo, is not a good self-published effort. The biggest problem is the art, both Arroyo's amateurish style and the overbearing computer coloring and texture effects Vera uses to try to hide the basic flaws. Vera's script is a little better, and gets points for packing a lot of story in there, but maybe too much. Some scenes, such as a guard revealing his love for a woman, only to be killed by her, needed more time to build up. More time needed to be spent developing the lead character, his relationship with his father, and with his sister. Too bad the many pages devoted to house ads couldn't have been used for this purpose, because, really, did I need to hear that "the Unbelievable Laundry Detergent Man" was in development as a film? Am I supposed to believe this? The black word balloons and the lettering in general are annoying and unclear as well. Vera also needs to refrain from so much dull regal-speak like, "And now you, with your foolish bravado, your arrogance, expect me, Lord Voxe, to remind--even relive, the pain and torment our people--my people, have longed to forget?!" Ironice that "Lord Voxe" is so hard to listen to. I wish the creators well, but premature debuts of what looks to be a lengthy fantasy epic don't make me want to stay on-board.

Easy Way #1 by Christopher E. Long and Andy Kuhn is, I believe, the first non-licensed crime comic from IDW, and it's a winner, a grimy story of a recovering coke addict named Duncan trying to clean up and get his wife and kids to stay in California. As his counselor says, any ideas he has now will be bad ones, and while he doesn't have one of his own, he follows a bad idea from a fellow rehabber, Raz, who wants to first abduct a cop's drug-sniffing dog and then locate a stash of drugs he knows about. When they discover in a trunk not drugs but severed fingers, they know they're in worse trouble than they expected. Unusual for an IDW book, both covers and interiors are on non-glossy cardstock, and the art is black, white and a pitiless maroon, and it all suits the story quite well. Long, who conceived the story while actually in rehab, has an authentic voice here, and Kuhn's art, while somewhat cartoonish, is also up to the task.