Dave's Comicbook Capsules Et Cetera
Intermittent Picks and Pans of Comics and Related Media

Standard Disclaimers: Please set appropriate followups. Recommendation does
not factor in price. Not all books will have arrived in your area this month.
An archive can be found on my homepage, http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/Rants
Finally had a surgery where they added instead of subtracted a thing.

Items of Note (strongly recommended or otherwise worthy): Batman: Wayne
Family Adventures vol 2.

In this installment: The Little Trashmaid Diving Deeper 01, Franken Fran
vol 1-8 (Omnibus editions), Chainsaw Man vol 12, Kaiju No. 8 vol 8, Spy x
Family the Official Guide Eyes Only, Spy x Family vol 10, Asadora! vol 7, The
Great Cleric vol 1, Henshin! vol 1, Batman: Wayne Family Adventures vol 2,
Comics For Ukraine - Sunflower Seeds, Fantastic Four #12, Superman Lost #6
(of 10), Transformers #1, Gargoyles #9, Gargoyles Dark Ages #3,
Vampirella/Dracula Rage #2 (of 6), Mech Cadets #2.

"Other Media" Capsules:

Things that are comics-related but not necessarily comics (i.e.
comics-based movies like Iron Man or Hulk), or that aren't going to be
available via comic shops (like comic pack-ins with DVDs) will go in this
section when I have any to mention. They may not be as timely as comic
reviews, especially if I decide to review novels that take me a week or two
(or ten) to get around to.

Nothing this month. Loki is underway and looking good. I finally
finished the first BluRay set of Spy x Family's anime, it's a good adaptation
but not something I feel the need to review on its own.

Digital Content:

Unless I find a really compelling reason to do so (such as a lack of
regular comics), I won't be turning this into a webcomic review column.
Rather, stuff in this section will generally be full books available for
reading online or for download, usually for pay.

The Little Trashmaid Diving Deeper 01: Silly Studios - This is an
anthology ebook of stories featuring The Little Trashmaid largely written and
drawn by other creators. These stories break the usual "no words, just
occasional pictograms" rule the series follows, with the first one
deliberately poking fun at the convention by showing that everyone had
plugged ears (earbuds for the human, chewing gum for the mermaid), so once
everyone's ears are cleared the rest of the book has dialogue. Fortunately
for me the dialogue is in English (it's an Italian studio), and the English
is good. This break in the format does let them explore some stories that
would kinda hard to set up in wordless format. I guess that's one way to
interpret the "Diving Deeper" title, although for the most part the stories
are tonally more shallow than some of the best of the regular series.
Recommended, available from sillystudiosofficial.com for 4.99 Euros.
Adventure Finders delayed by an outside paying gig Espinosa is eager to
do.

Trades:

Trade paperbacks, collections, graphic novels, pocket manga, whatever.
If it's bigger than a "floppy" it goes here.

Franken Fran vol 1-8 (Omnibus Editions): Seven Seas Entertainment -
Years ago, a friend pointed me at this series when it was being posted online
(the site that carried it no longer has it...the link page is there but all
the links are rotted). I found it amusing, but didn't like reading it
online, so gave up around chapter 7, still in volume 1. A few months ago I
discovered it had been "completed" (although it's more that the creator
wanted to do something else, it doesn't really resolve much) and was
available in four two-volume omnibus editions. So I decided to get it. Now,
here's the important part: this is rather gory horror humor. Like, it had a
lot more bare breasts than I'd remembered (early Seven Seas was apparently
big on that), but frankly if you're bothered by the nudity the medical horror
is going to be WAY worse for you. This entire series is one big trigger
warning for body horror, the cheesecake is tertiary at best. (Other than the
covers, Fran herself is always demurely dressed, typically in a lab coat, but
apparently the creator knew his audience when it came time to do the cover
art.) That said, if you can handle a lot of detailed albeit black and white
medical horror depiction, I found this to be darkly humorous and while things
got problematic here and there (a touch of homophobia, more than a little
misogyny on display), it did a pretty good job of selling its high concept.
What's the high concept? What if a Japanese WWII version of Mengele escaped
justice and created a "daughter" to carry on his work advancing medical
science? Fran Madaraki is that daughter, a sort of cute girl Frankenstein's
Monster complete with giant bolts on her head (for some reason the neck bolts
of Karloff's portrayal migrate onto the sides of the head in a lot of
manga/anime homages). She has an ethical code and honestly tries to make the
world a better place, but she's terribly naive and sometimes more interested
in seeing what will happen next than in fixing the fallout of some of her
works. More than one story ends in Fran musing some version of, "Did I just
doom humanity? Ah well." Most of the chapters fall into one of three basic
categories: Monkey's Paw Wishes (Fran does a procedure to help someone become
happy, and it does not work out very well), Poetic Justice (Fran does
something for money and it rebounds badly on the horrible person who paid for
it...rapists get particularly gruesome comeuppance), and Cryptobiological
Mystery (strange diseases and parasites, or sometimes uncovering projects of
her father's that have gone roaming). There's a few other types of story in
there, but those three cover most of the 60+ chapters. The last omnibus is
dominated by revisiting ideas from previous volumes, such as the living
mascots of a theme park, or the ongoing Kamen Rider pastiches. Along the
way, Fran's crowd of weird minions (including a human-headed cat who has
human intelligence but a cat's indifference to anything that doesn't affect
him) is joined by a pair of sisters, other creations of the never-seen
Dr. Madaraki. Both the older and younger sister are way more interested in
killing than healing, yet somehow Fran still does more damage in the long
run. Anyway, if anything I described seems even a little offputting, don't
read this manga. I have, if anything undersold it by a lot because I don't
want to write a review that needs a trigger warning, and might already be in
that territory. So, if you've heard of this manga and think it's more
"Nightmare Before Christmas" or "Frankenweenie" stuff, it is definitely NOT.
But if you're okay with some pretty outre biological horror described in a
calm and clinical voice by a moe mad scientist, you might find this series
amusing. On a craft level, this is really "whatever amused/interested the
creator at the time," and the continuity is a touch rough, a lot of chapters
end on apparent cliffhangers that get ignored. It's more about recurring
gags (some of which will MAKE you gag) and characters than actual continuity.
$19.99/$24.99Cn per omnibus, four total.

Chainsaw Man vol 12: Viz/Shonen Jump - Now for something slightly less
gory and body-horror-y. While the title character does show up in the last
couple of chapters, this is almost entirely about setting up a new
antagonist, a girl who has to make a contract with the Devil of War to save
her life from another devil-contracting classmate. War thinks she can make
Chainsaw "give back" an erased concept...in the first arc it was revealed
that when the Chainsaw Devil killed another devil, it could utterly erase the
concept that the devil embodied. For instance, when the 9/11 Devil was
killed, everyone forgot 9/11 even happened, save for devils and some of their
contractees. The reader has no idea if Chainsaw can un-destroy in the first
place (and Denji sure has no clue, not that he's aware of this whole thing
yet), so it could all be a fool's errand. But in a world where 35% of people
are likely to die to a devil, all errands may be fool's errands. Interesting
start to the next uber-arc. Recommended, but gory. $11.99/$15.99Cn/#8.99UK

Kaiju No. 8 vol 8: Viz/Shonen Jump - Sorry, still at least a little
gore, but at least it's just monster gore. Just as most of CSM12 is about
someone other than the title character, Kafka only shows up in the last few
chapters of this one as well. The first two thirds focus entirely on two
previously background members of the kaiju hunter force, one of whom is
seeking to become worthy of a numbered weapon, one of the insanely powerful
devices made from the remains of kaiju powerful enough to have earned numbers
(the fact that after centuries we're on Kaiju No. 8 tells you how rare this
is). These guys get shoved center stage a little abruptly, although it
doesn't help that the volume size is based on page count rather than
story...if the last few chapters of vol 7 had been put in this volume it
would've flowed a lot better. Still, while he doesn't have a lot of
pagecount, Kafka makes those pages count as he comes to a new understanding
of his life and motivations. Recommended. $11.99/$15.99Cn/#8.99UK