Category Archives: Comixology Submit

June 8, 2013 · 5:24 pm

Review: HELL’S BREW #1 by Michael Liggett

Among this week’s ComiXology Submit releases is “Hell’s Brew #1” with this synopsis: “This is not your history…but it is your nightmare! Double-crossed and kicked in the dirt, Gabriel Garcia is out for revenge. He’s looking for the man who killed his brother come Hell or high water…but there ain’t no water in the desert!” Now, that’s a good kind of crazy to start with.

This 18-pager, priced at $0.99, is full of the stuff you’d hope to find from something this far on the edge. Liggett takes it to the limit but he doesn’t fly without a parachute. He’s laid down a solid foundation. The first page gives us a fine scenario: an alternate America, 1968, where the power grid has gone berserk and the Southwestern region is all but forgotten. Electric cars are dominant. For kicks, the lost kids create gasoline-fueled hotrods. They race all night through the forgotten desert highways.

Gabriel has just been let out of prison and this dead-ender is pissed off! Somebody killed his brother! He’s going to knock heads until he finds his bro’s killer and then he’s going to…kill him! I love it. We really cut to the chase with an unambiguous mission. Of course, there will be side trips, detours, and maybe even some romance, along the way but we’ve got a confident cartoonist behind the wheel to see us through. The art is sharp and the plot is priceless. We’re off and running.

There is definitely more going on here than just an action-packed adventure in some crazy wasteland, although that already sounds like plenty.

Visit our friends at ComiXology. And check out the first issue of “Hell’s Brew” at ComiXology here.

Review: ‘Time Samplers’

ComiXology’s Submit line-up this week includes the first issue of an intriguing comic with a time travel theme, “Time Samplers.” Created by Thomas Gorence, it is written by Thomas Gorence, Erik Koconis, David Pinckney and drawn by Christopher Hanchey. Published by Paranoid American, it is 37 pages priced at $2.99. If you enjoy a plot laced with a healthy dose of conspiracy theory, this one takes care of you in more ways than one. Yes, indeed, this is a wild ride coming at you from various vantage points and with enough twists to keep any fan of time travel stories quite satisfied.

Didn’t we go through a very strange “adjustment” to our financial instituitons not so long ago? We’re all familiar with the big players in the banking system, including J.P. Morgan Chase, are we not? Well, return to the source for insider trading and the like, the original crew of fat cats at Jekyll Island, circa 1913. Point of fact, it was at this elite country club that J.P. and friends cobbled together the U.S. Federal Reserve. In this comic, we find these industrialists meeting with Alexander Graham Bell to discuss his proposals to control the masses through sound waves. Not a bad idea but no one is fully won over quite yet. Although, they are interested in Bell’s prototypes for human slaves in the form of “sheeple.”

That is the scene that two adventurous young men, Cal and Lex, drop in on, through their employment with a mad scientist. It’s a great set up and well worth sticking around for. The artwork is an animated and fun style, light and purposeful. There is attention to backgrounds, architecture, gadgets, and characters. All in all, a comic that brings its A game to the table. You get quirky dialogue, well paced action, and a time travel scenario to sink your teeth into.

Also, as part of this comic, you get a shorter work, “Operation Midnight Climax,” which as a scary amount of CIA stories to tell. Compressed into a mini-comic format, there’s a nice gritty feel to this story of CIA agent George Hunter White and how the CIA made use of just about any and all available drugs for what it considered the greater good.

You can check out “Time Samplers #1” at ComiXology here.

And be sure to keep up with Time Samplers at their site, Twitter, Facebook, and at Paranoid American.

Review: ‘Secundus: Part I’ by Mike Thomas

“Secundus” is another one of those spare, and seemingly simple, works of comics with deeper levels running through it. Mike Thomas wrote and drew this story about a gladiator who, on the day that he should have earned his freedom, the court magician, eager not to lose the emperor’s favor, hathces a way to interfere.

Giving it a careful read, I found this to keep to a slow but steady pace. There are enough little clues to future developments to keep me interested. It would be unfair to write this one off, especially since it clearly has a wider scope in mind and we’re only 32 pages into it.

The cover, and the synopiss, got me. For only 99 cents, you can check it out for yourself at ComiXology’s Submit, a new platform for emerging comics talent. You can check out “Secundus” here.