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From: dvandom@eyrie.org (Dave Van Domelen)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.misc
Subject: Dave's Capsules for April 2025
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2025 03:34:01 -0000 (UTC)
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Originator: dvandom@eyrie.org (Dave Van Domelen)

                    Dave's Comicbook Capsules Et Cetera
          Generally Monthly 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
       Well, none of this month's tornadoes got too close to me.

     At the moment, it looks like printed matter is slipping through the
trade war random tariffs, but that is likely to last only until someone
brings it to the attention of the President.  I've been seeing comics and
gaming store owners interviewed on national nightly news about the impending
doom.  

     Anyway, since this is a light month, I decided to try harder to check
out new titles, both via LibraryPass and looking around for ideas.  One thing
I tried was looking for lists of well-regarded superhero manga.  In addition
to usual suspects like My Hero Academia and One-Punch Man, there were a few
that looked good but the translations either got cut off mid-story (Ratman)
or that don't seem to be available in print at all (Heroic Complex).  In
general, I'd rather not start a manga with too much backlog, if only because
it can be a real hassle trying to FIND all the older volumes (Spy x Family
was a real hunt, and I started at vol 7!), so the farther along it is the
less inclined I am to give it a shot.  Still, I did try out Shy below,
despite my reluctance regarding its backlog. 

     Items of Note (strongly recommended or otherwise worthy): Nothing this
month.  

     In this installment: What If...Wanda Maximoff and Peter Parker were
Siblings?, Stardust the Super Wizard archive, I Picked Up This World's
Strategy Guide vol 1-2, Octo-Girl vol 1, Magilumiere Magical Girls vol 7,
Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear vol 12, Mecha-Ude: Mechanical Arms vol 1, Shy vol 1. 


"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.

     What If...Wanda Maximoff and Peter Parker were Siblings?: Marvel/Random
House Worlds - I got this a few months ago, but it finally made it to the top
of my virtual TBR stack.  I haven't gotten the other books in the series, and
don't plan to, I picked this up in part because Seanan McGuire wrote it (and
did not write the others).  There's an arc connecting the three novels,
involving America Chavez's role in things, but the actual story of Wanda and
Peter does wrap up in just this volume.  Lots of third person
semi-omniscient, getting inside Wanda's head, but at the same time things
unfurl in a dramatic enough fashion (unlike the traditionally under-emotional
Watchers narrating a What If, America gets invested in the story).  There's a
certain amount of "It's Marvel, so these things must happen in every
timeline," along with the standard "any alternate timeline will necessarily
be at least a little worse than the main timeline" element long established
for What Ifs, but the story is not a complete bummer, and McGuire really put
a lot of thought into all the ways things would change despite the things
that could not.  Recommended.  Price depends on format, currently $13.99 for
the Kindle edition, but I got it when it was on sale for $2.99. 

     I started two "based on the comics" shows this month, Doom Patrol S4 and
Iyanu Child of Wonder S1.  While I plan to eventually finish Doom Patrol (got
about halfway through this month), after watching the first three episodes of
Iyanu I didn't really feel like watching more.  I think part of it is that
Iyanu is a more faithful adaptation, while Doom Patrol is riffing on
storylines and character elements while also telling new stories.  I think
that's kind of a thing for me lately, where I really like a comic or manga
but don't really get into the anime that tells fundamentally the same story.
I did get through the first half season of Spy X Family, but the second half
has been sitting on my To Be Watched pile unwatched.  I got one episode into
Delicious in Dungeon.  I have watched all of the motion-comic of Way of the
Househusband so far, but that's vignettes and easier to do in bite-sized
chunks.  All in all, I prefer to consume media at my own pace, if you want me
to go at your pace you need to bring something I can't get in other formats
(different story, REALLY good animation or voice work/acting or music), or at
least not demand too much of my time.  Conversely, once I've seen enough of
an anime or cartoon, I'm less interested in reading the manga/comic if it's
substantially the same story, part of why I don't just pick up the My Hero
Academia manga at some point post-volume-1. 

     Oh, and I saw Ninja Batman's sequel (Ninja Batman vs. the Yakuza League)
on the shelves, but left it there.  The original was a "cool art, no story"
mess, there really wasn't anything there I wanted to see more of. 


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.  I will also occasionally
include things I read on Library Pass (check to see if your public library
gives access to it), although the interface can be laggy and freeze
sometimes. 

     Stardust the Super Wizard: Zoop, more or less - Last month I mentioned
the crowdfunded collection of entirely new Stardust stories, but what they
did deliver in time for me to read this month was a PDF of all the original
Fletcher Hanks stories (1939-1941).  If you've been online long enough,
you've probably seen a few panels of this public domain series, and really
it's all as crazy as the snippets suggest.  The fairly short and unevenly
drawn stories read like they were based on 5 year old kids playing superhero,
with one of the kids always having to win and making up whatever new powers
he needed in order to do so.  Got a problem?  Stardust has a ray for it.  And
on the rare occasions where his opponents were ray-proof, he was also
superhumanly strong, fast, and durable.  Despite Spectre-level powers, he
mostly fights gangsters, spies, gangster-spies, racketeers, and The Fifth
Column (without whom invasion is "impossible," and no matter how many of them
he kills there's always thousands more next issue), although once in a while
he fights menaces from other planets.  Despite his impressive surveillance
equipment and impossible speed, he is also like the Spectre in that he mostly
punishes criminals for their deeds rather than stopping those deeds entirely.
So, everyone on Mars dies.  Thousands die as a massive wave smashes ships on
its way to shore.  That sort of thing.  He is totally winging it.  The whole
thing really does feel like Hanks was taking dictation from some kids and
just drawing what they said in the final minutes before a deadline.  There is
a whimsy and energy to it, of course.  But if you look at a McCloud-style
spectrum with Jack Kirby at one end and soulless technical perfection at the
other, these comics took a running leap off the Kirby end and are still going
outwards on super-excited light.  I don't think there's really a
recommendation I can make here one way or the other, but it's public domain
and you should be able to find copies floating about if you wish to
experience it.  Note, there's surprisingly little racism for a 1939-41 comic,
a few mentions of criminals framing "Japs" for an attack early on before
Hanks settles on just pointing at vague "invader nations" without naming any
of them.  All the villains are grotesque, but Stardust can drift off-model in
some pretty horrifying ways too.  The worst racist caricature I noticed was
in the gang leader Slant-Eyes, whose eyes were literally diagonally tilted,
but otherwise didn't seem to be an Asian caricature (everyone has about the
same speech patterns, with varying levels of gangster slang, but Hanks
doesn't really have much variation in dialogue).  Mind you, there's probably
still some coded racism in there just because of The Way Things Were, but
there's no buck-toothed monkey guys mixing up R and L, or obvious German or
Italian slope-brow brutes that were so common in propaganda of the time.  And
that counts for something (unfortunately) when talking about early Golden Age
comics.  

     I Picked Up This World's Strategy Guide vol 1: Yen Press - I was
browsing the recent releases on LibraryPass (Empowered vol 12 is on it, BTW)
and decided to give this a read.  It's a full-color manga by Atchi Ai, and a
sort of "isekai themes but with a native" story.  Sana is an NPC in a fantasy
JRPG world when she stumbles across a copy of the strategy guide to her
world, Eternal Story III (yeah, I suspect there's more than a little Final
Fantasy in the flavoring of this homage).  So, rather than a character being
brought into the game world, it's a thing, but in the process it changes the
world in ways that a human visitor would.  Because the story hasn't started
yet, the book has an oracular nature to Sana (who mistakes the copyright
notice as a badge of being a Forbidden Book), and she manages to save her
brother from a bit of tragic backstory happening to him, then tries to
prevent another bit of bad backstory...the hero's side quests are often about
correcting an injustice or dealing with the fallout of injustice, and Sana
wants to stop them from happening entirely.  This, of course, leads to the
usual change-the-future issue of making things different but not necessarily
better along the way, but by the end of the volume she stumbles into the
start of the main story questline, oops.  I guess she's a victim of the
narrative now.  I did end up finding this in hardcopy form (along with volume
2, see below) before the end of the month...I found volume 2 first because it
was properly alphabetized under I-space-P, while volume 1 was two whole
shelves away under IP no space in between, oops.  (Rather a lot of manga
start with the personal pronoun!) Recommended.  $15.00/$19.50Cn, rated Teen
LV.  Not a lot of either L or V in this volume, but it might get rougher
later. 

     Expected next month: The next Adventure Finders epilogue has been pushed
back, but should come out in May. 



Manga Collections:

     Most of these are "tankobon" or collections of work serialized in a
weekly or monthly publication, although some were written directly for the
collection.  All of them have been translated from Japanese (or maybe Korean,
although I don't think I'm reading any manhwa) into English.  Things with a
manga aesthetic but done in English originally will go in one of the sections
below as appropriate. 

     Octo-Girl vol 1: Marvel/Viz - This came out a few months ago, but while
browsing upcoming releases I saw volume 2, and my immediate reaction was,
"Who the Hell(TM) greenlit a manga combining a Japanese schoolgirl with
mechanical tentacles?"  I mean, this is NOT an adult manga, not that I'd
expect Marvel to officially publish anything that did more than wink at the
whole tentacles-and-schoolgirls trope, but I read through a bit of this
volume in the store and decided to pick it up.  And it's actually kinda
sweet.  In terms of continuity, it's got a loose tie to the Deadpool Samurai
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