Comic Stack – 04/15/15

Low #1 by Rick Remender (writer), Greg Tocchini (artist)
Publisher: Image Comics
Genre: Science Fiction, Fantasy,

When I first started reading this, I was a little bored with it. It seemed to be about humans living underwater, trying to figure out where new planets are to move to when, not if, they had to evacuate their current underwater home. I just wasn’t interested in the post-coital rambling between this man and woman even if was about space things… AT FIRST. Then, things took a very interesting turn when the mother in this book (the dreamer) and the father (the realist) begin teaching their two girls how to “fly” what is basically an underwater spaceship. When they ship is attacked, the interest level went up considerably because “That escalated quickly!”

You know I really have to give it to Image comics for taking on so many bold and different comics. Often these are comics that end up amazing me with how much I actually love them. I love stories that blend these kind of things together. A little bit of sci-fi, a little bit of fantasy, and a story line that managed to make my heart beat faster with just the first issue. It’s especially amazing when I’m not feeling it and then BAM! I’m starting to love the story. I have the first volume of this as a galley, and I’m kind of anxious to see where it goes now. And the art is amazing.I don’t want to go into this too much more because, as I said, I have the whole first volume and I feel I’ll be reviewing this soon.

Also, the most important part of this book is that there are tentacles. That is all.

Day Men #1 by Matt Gagnon (writer), Michael Alan Nelson (writer), Michael Stelfreeze (artist)
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Genres: Horror, Supernatural, Crime

I love vampires, but over the years, I have gotten sick of vampires. I’ve started to want to see more ingenuity in the faction of horror I have loved since I first met Damon Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries books when I was a preteen. (Damon is my first fictional boyfriend. I don’t care what you say.) I hate how stale they’ve become, though, but I love vampires. So, who can blame me for reading a vampire comic? And this comic proved to be IMMEDIATELY amazing, and I don’t just say that because I love vampires. From the very first page, I was like:

Yes, I am a big wrestling turbonerd. Leave me alone.

Day Men follows David Reid. He is a day man, called “sun dog” by those who seem to dislike them and who they work for. The job of the day men is to conduct the business their vampire employers can’t handle in the day time. We see what a typical day in David’s day is like which is full of things like paying bribes, finding drunk family vampires,  procuring artifacts he can’t stare at, having to hand people’s asses back them them–that sort of thing.  However, the vampire world is precarious and is run by different factions who have their territories. David works for the Virgos whose matriarch is a vampire named Azelea Virgo. One of the other factions introduced is called the Ramses. Neither family cares for each other much, and after one bad night, David’s life is about to turn upside down… more than it already is.

I’m not going to lie and say this is some phenomenal new idea because it’s not, but it’s the way the story is told, to see things from the POV of a non-vampire and the stuff he has to go through to protect their interests, which leads him to some strange scenarios. Right now, the vampires are really the background characters of the story while being the catalysts as you encounter not only David, but various other day men in the book including day men who work within the same families and are considered their “champions.”

David is young. He’s new to the business (been around 5 months now!), and he’s already having a bad week that is about to get worst if I’m to go on that cliffhanger. His only real friend right now is a human executive assistant type for the vampires named Casey whom enjoys sunrises with (when her job ends and his job typically begins) him.

I’m hoping to see a lot more of Casey, too, though. She’s snappy and efficient, and even kind of speaks her mind to the vampires who employ her.