Written by Joe Casey
Doc Bizarre, M.D.
Illustrated by Andy SurianoFrom monsters crippled with pneumonia or demons suffering from incontinence, only one man claims to possess the skills and the training to cure what ails them? DOC BIZARRE, M.D.! He’ll make globe hopping house calls for sick creepers, medically challenged myths and ghouls at death’s door!
Haunt #19
Illustrated by Nathan FoxAN ALL-NEW CREATIVE TEAM KICKS OFF WITH A BOLD NEW DIRECTION! Brothers Daniel and Kurt Killgore have shared an ominous power, but things begin to unravel – for both of them – when a past tragedy comes back to haunt them. All-new action! All-new enemies! The new nightmare begins…NOW!
Vengeance #5
Illustrated by Nick DragottaHistory, destiny, and tragedy collide, as young Johann Schmidt reaches his apotheosis and the Third Reich climbs to the regrettable heights of its terrible power. A tremendous evil is unleashed on the world, and humanity will never be the same for it again.
Joe Casey Overload. More after the jump.
The three faces of Joe Casey are on display this week: the comic, the violent, and the information-overdosed. Of course, these qualities don’t operate distinctly from one another, and where you find one, you find the others. Each of the three titles Casey has out this week takes on one of those trends as their aegis. Black comedy is the driving force between Doc Bizarre, M.D., Casey’s collaboration with Andy Suriano. Chaos and bloody brutality provide the conflict for Haunt #19, the first issue of Casey’s run with Nathan Fox. Finally, in Vengeance #5, Casey and Nick Dragotta start to bring their under-the-skin Marvel epic together, with a look into yet another side of the company’s endlessly hidden history.
Doc Bizarre is the story of, er, Doc Bizarre, general practitioner of the occult, supernatural, and scientifically perverse. He is, as heroes go, boldly unencumbered by his own obliviousness — and for that reason, his demonic sidekick Epoch is constantly called upon to actually set things right. The two venture to deepest, darkest Romania in order to cure a Frankenstein-esque corpse-monster’s impotence, and things only get stranger from there. Most mad-scientist comedy stories rely on, well, exploiting the bombastic retro-sci-fi tics of older, more enthusiastically earnest stories and trying to play it both ways: screaming “SCIENCE!” as both exultation and punchline. Thankfully, Doc Bizarre veers well away from that course. Call it “smart dumb” — the story’s clever, but nearly every character bar Epoch is a moron (and even Epoch has a Butt-Head gene somewhere in his structure, down to the “ROK” t-shirt). They’re entertaining morons, though, which takes a smart writer to pull off.
Andy Suriano’s art on Doc Bizarre is a sort of Silver Age blender. He’s not as specific in his influence as, say, Tom Scioli’s Kirby-ism in Godland — a Kirby troll or shout here, a skewed and stilted Ditko posture there, a general ambience straight out of old pre-Code E.C., et cetera. Where a lot of retro-comix artists strive for a simplified, smoother, easier digested “retro” aura, Suriano’s style is harsh and full of ragged edges. It’s perfect for the craggly story Casey gives him, and it gives an uncomfortable physicality to a story that’s about, uh, uncomfortable physicality.
Speaking of uncomfortable physicality: there are few artists working today who capture the grime of the everyday world like Nathan Fox. Other artists draw a city street and might focus on the cars, the fire hydrants, the occasional tree. Fox puts all that stuff in, but his emphasis is on how it’s all totally falling apart. Not in any kind of horrible apocalyptic sense, mind — although he does do good apocalypse — but it’s a dirty world out there, full of chipped concrete and stray cigarette butts, wrinkled clothes and unshaven chins. Fox’s figures zoom around, turbo-charged, but he never sacrifices the qualities that make his work come off as far more realistic than even the most slavishly photo-synthetic comics artists. So it is with Haunt.
On Casey’s end, Haunt is another in his string of Image relaunches, following Wildcats and Youngblood. The M.O. is the same — keep the core premise and the stuff he likes, and launch it off in pursuit of his own ideas to fill the remaining space. Haunt’s supporting cast goes away — quite literally — and the hero (wearing the ghost of his brother as a super-suit) is thrust into grisly conflict with “the Second Church,” a comic-book menace if there ever was one. The direction is promising, but as an introductory issue, it mostly highlights how much of the previous 18 issues are now missing, rather than what we need to know for the issues to come. Still, propelled by the nervous energy of Fox’s artwork, it’s hard to miss the target.
Continued belowWhile both of the Image titles Casey has out this week are fresh starts, his Marvel output — namely, Vengeance #5 — is a conclusion in the making. Over the course of Vengeance‘s brief run, plotlines were initially diffuse and rather opaque: things happened, and while it felt obvious that they were somehow connected (after all, they were sharing space in a comic book), the actual connections were hard to tease out. You know what they say about those who wait, though. Now, things are finally starting to pull together — it may not be a perfect closing of the story’s ranks, but it’s better than perfect in that it’s exciting. Besides, the “Z” clue points toward one of Casey’s best creations making an appearance in the finale, and that’s always something to celebrate.
Nick Dragotta is given a lot to handle in the fifth piece of Vengeance — quiet moments of conversation and insane zombie wars involving an old Dr. Strange villain. He excels at both, and his his strength is clarity. Even when things risk getting, well, insane (see aforementioned zombie war), his shot choices are generally impeccable, and it’s never hard to figure out what’s going on. That may sound like damning with faint praise, but in a comic with as much going on as Vengeance, it’s a sign of tremendous skill — after all, there is an absolutely crazy amount of stuff happening in this book, and a gigantic cast of characters on top of it. Brad Simpson’s coloring aids tremendously, too, with the color scheme of each scene shifting like the tone and tempo of a soundtrack.
It’s a good week to be a Joe Casey fan. All of the choices on offer provide a certain amount of insouciant wit, scruffy edges, and power violence, but even beyond that, there’s a variation that provides something for nearly everyone. Well, except for people who just want more boring superhero stuff.
Final Verdict: 8 (Doc Bizarre), 7 (Haunt), 8 (Vengeance) – Come on, at least one of them sings to you
