We Become the First People to Read Comixology Original Books (We Think)

In an all-too-plausible future, the nation is split. The old country is dead. This is New America #1, written by Curt Pires, drawn by Luca Casalanguida, colored by Mark Dale, lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou and published by Comixology Originals.

It’s a ballad of love, murder, sketchy flyboys and at least one creepy robot in Barnstormers #1, written by Scott Snyder, drawn by Tula Lotay, colored by Dee Cunniffe, lettered by Richard Starkings and published by Comixology Originals.

What’s a poor woman trying to make ends meet on the farm by doing some bootlegging on the side supposed to do when some vampires show up and wreck shit? Time for some revenge, we reckon, in Blood Oath #1, written by Rob Hart and Alex Segura, drawn by Joe Eisma, colored by Hilary Jenkins, lettered by Jim Campbell and published by Comixology Originals.

Will Nevin: Ian — it’s your favorite. It’s my favorite. It’s … another theme week! This time, we’re taking up three books from the Comixology Originals line since … well, I’m not sure if anyone else is reading them. These books exist. They make money for creators, especially Scott Snyder, who seems to have about 15 of them running at the moment. But they dropped right around the time that Amazon nerfed the app and torpedoed the brand to hell.

Anyway, as usual, it falls to us to read the books that are going unread — regardless of whether the fractionally tiny piece of Jeff Bezos’ empire is actually making good decisions.

Ian Gregory: A long time ago, when Comixology was new, I bought a ton of classic comics there to read. I had a great time, and then, years later, when I wanted to read them again, they weren’t in my account. Maybe Comixology lost the rights to them, or maybe I didn’t use the right login. Either way, I have since harbored a grudge against digital comics platforms and the transient nature of their products. Never has that problem been more apparent than in recent months, where it’s looked increasingly likely that Comixology is going to shut down altogether.

Let’s get these leftovers in before they spoil.

Will: Nothing ever spoils if you’re adventurous enough, Ian.

New America #1: One Freshest Chicken, One Turtledove

Will: You ever read DMZ? Writer Brian Wood has been credibly accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, but that didn’t stop HBO Max from adapting his book into a miniseries. I got bored a few arcs into it, and one reason was that it never (at least to the point that I read) spelled out what caused both the United States to split and its subsequent second civil war, and it never defined what was ideologically distinct about the two nascent nations. Here, in New America, it’s very much different — or at least it appears to be different — in that we’re given a neo-Confederate state and whatever the titular country is as some sort of left/center-left enclave.

I love a good dystopian look at a near-future America because we’re all so very fucked. You don’t elect a Donald Trump-style racist, know-nothing fascist and come back from that as a democracy. Anywho, what did you think of the setup for this series?

Ian: This is some Harry Turtledove shit. It’s hack.

Will: Guns of the South reference! (That’s all I know, never read the books.)

Ian: Maybe that’s harsh, but my tolerance for this sort of surface-level political parody is very low. The premise itself is too vague — New America is evidently some sort of secessionist state, but one which the right-wing U.S. government has decided to tolerate? Even in the setup, I felt things were far too vague — how big is New America? How old is it? I had too many questions for me to take the premise seriously. There’s a difference between rolling things out over time and beggaring belief.

Furthermore, and perhaps this is my own political leaning speaking, but I found this centrist stuff to be immensely boring. The villains are a vague Neo Nazi Confederate conglomerate, and also they’re secretly gay! Ha! Isn’t it funny when homophobes turn out to secretly be gay? That pissed me off, to be honest. The AOC-knockoff Sen. Cruz is derided for not being one of the people who has to make Hard Decisions, and so her ideas are therefore useless.

This verges on self-satisfied.

Will: Points well-taken. Keep in mind that I have trash taste, but I liked the macro — give me any sort of political drama in a comic, and I’ll eat that shit up. Yet I was not all that intrigued about the micro. If you don’t know enough to care about a country, why are you going to care about its president and his estranged brother?

Ian: To be honest, I don’t care about the president and his estranged brother. I don’t care for any of the characters we met in this issue, and none of them have more than the most surface-level characteristics (“loving and supportive brother with a dark side,” “estranged younger brother with a dark side,” “faithful military commander with a dark side,” and so on).

Will: Still, it’s probably my Freshest Chicken of the Week, nosing out the next book by a scootch owing to 1) some very strong colors and 2) a more consistent tone throughout. I also didn’t hate Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s lettering. Is that personal growth?

Ian: The art and coloring were great. The lettering was good. I have no complaints to register.

Will: At least no complaints on the visuals, eh?

Barnstormers #1: One Fresh Chicken with a Side of Weird Ass Robot

Will: Speaking of Snyder’s multitude of Comixology books, this is certainly … one of them. It’s not bad — the art is great — but the visions of the mechanical monster threw me a bit. And the narration at the end (“Everyone in this book will die!” or some such) was strange. I like the idea of a scammer flyboy in the 1920s (Note: no apostrophe there), but like I said, tonally, this was all over the place.

Ian: Everything except the robot visions landed for me. It’s a great premise, in a well-defined historical period. It’s amazing visuals and costuming, a sort of classic pulp-style hero, and an interesting setup for what looks like a sort of collision with the Pinkertons. There’s also the question of why the operator set up Bix to ruin Tillie’s wedding — I liked all of this. The robot just felt so deeply out of place that I felt it distracted from what was already an interesting, well-set-up story.

Will: Did you get the same Above Snakes vibe as I got here? I think I maybe would have enjoyed this more if it leaned harder into the weirdness. Also, the “absconding with the bride only to be chased by the groom” is a bit straight from Smokey and the Bandit, but I don’t expect you to appreciate an American classic such as that.

Ian: You’re right, Will, I definitely don’t know that one except by name. I know what you mean about Above Snakes — a sort of vaguely surrealistic, over-narrated, historically adjacent story. I think, however, I would have enjoyed it more if it leaned away from the weirdness and embraced being a period piece about a pilot, a bride and an evil family and the Pinkertons. There are already so many textured, interesting elements to work with in that collection that you don’t really need to add Mr. Baby or whatever into the mix.

Will: A couple of these books — our next one especially — could have done less in terms of plot and genre twists, and I would have liked them more. As Montgomery Scott famously said, “The more you overtake the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.”

Visually, I thought the book was a winner — I loved the realism, the lettering, the wispy colors, even the overall design/trade dress.

Ian: I liked the collage-style elements in the art, and as I said, the costuming is fantastic. I love the design work on these characters. The lettering was fine in the narration and text bubbles, but I really didn’t like the sound effects, which felt a little too stock-bubble-text for me, and didn’t match the art in any way. This is my Freshest Chicken of the Week.

Blood Oath #1: Enough with the Vampires Already

Will: You ever get to a turn in a story and it *instantly* becomes less interesting? I was enjoying the book about a lady farmer on Staten Island making ends meet during Prohibition by running a little hootch, but I am way less interested about said farmer engaging in said bootlegging while competing against vampires. Are we still doing vampires? Are they still a thing? Blah.

Ian: It’s funny that both this and Barnstormers take place in 1927 and feature solid historical setups with fantastical intrusions. Here, I didn’t mind the appearance of the vampires so much because I felt the premise didn’t have quite enough meat to work with. Barnstormers disappointed me by having a great plot already set up and then layering the science fiction stuff on top of it. This, however, doesn’t really have a plot until the vampires show up. What really bugged me was that we’ve almost immediately discarded the bootlegging setup by burning it all down in the first issue, and it looks like this will turn into a fairly standard action/revenge series. I would have liked it if they stuck a little closer to the organized crime elements.

Will: I mean, I guess this can work as a revenge book or a supernatural mafia book or whatever, but I’d still rather have it without the vamps. I thought before they showed up, the storytelling was really strong, especially in how it got me invested in Hazel as a character. After? It started to really fall off, particularly in the action scenes.

Ian: It’s a nice, slow start that fakes you out with the first twist (wow, lovely farmer lady is a bootlegger!) and then digs itself deeper with a second twist (vampires). That’s a good start, but I agree that everything after the vampires arrived felt a little rote. It’s not about the kind of supernatural creature, it’s about what you do with them.

Will: The art felt … a little amateurish? I thought the coloring didn’t help either, most notably when the script says it’s “late,” and there’s still plenty of light in the sky.

Ian: I felt that the open spaces were a little too blank. It looks a little like a sketch of the landscape that was filled in with coloring, and it leaves large portions of this book looking blank or underdeveloped.

Does This Smell OK?

Sound Effects Watch: A thin week this week, so I’m giving it to the half-page “BLAM” in New America that comes as our protagonist executes a man.
Rapid fire questions:
- What Confederate memorial would you most like to smash into pieces?
  - Will: Alabama’s own First White House of the Confederacy. If I couldn’t take it down, I’d settle for the star on the state house steps where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office.
  - Ian: Get the Jefferson Davis statue out of the United States Capitol, for chrissakes. Absurd.
- What’s your scam to steal money from rubes?
  - Will: It’d have to be a fake medical cure, right? I’d tell them that these “special abrasive discs” (Brillo pads) are a preventive for COVID … but only if you use them inside your butthole. Also, you have to buy them direct from me at a 7,000% markup.
  - Ian: Consider this, Will. You know how art online can be reproduced digitally and there’s no sense of true ownership because there’s no one original master copy? Well, what if we could sell digital certificates of ownership for individual pieces of art, thereby conferring ownership over a digital artifact. How do we guarantee uniqueness? Well, there’s this little thing you may not have heard of called “the blockchain,” and — hey, wait! Come back!
    - Will: We could have kept this idea to ourselves, you know. That’s what staff meetings are for!
- Favorite vampire story?
  - Will: It’s been years since I’ve seen it, but Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
  - Ian: Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Coppola is a lavish, beautiful production in which all of the actors appeared to have been filmed in the midst of a delirium-inducing fever.
Casserole of the Week: Breakfast Casserole. I made this at the start of the Alabama football season for a morning game against Texas. It’s been all downhill since then, but the casserole is good. Pro tip: You can’t have too much sausage in this. Or cheese. I think I threw in some cubed ham too. And maybe some bacon.
Leftovers that are 70,000 years old? No, I think we can throw those out.
The idea of turning Thanksgiving leftovers into lasagna makes me irrationally angry.
Better use of leftover smoked turkey? Red beans and rice.