New comic book Wednesday has come and gone. The dust at your local comic shop has settled. An eerie silence descends as you finish reading your last superhero book of the week. Now it's time for something a little more sinister. Welcome to Bagged and Boarded: comic reviews of the sick, spooky, twisted and terrifying!
Army of Darkness vs. Hack/Slash No. 2Cassie Hack and Ash Williams are out to find the group who’s selling pages from The Book of the Dead and using its nasty magic to make the world a darker place. In this issue they track down a man who suddenly turned very evil and ended up in prison. Now they have to bust him out, find out if the book turned him bad, and then kill him.
Bag it or board it up? The versus in the title of this comic is there for good reason. I assumed it would be one of those sensational prepositions to hint at strife when the heroes really collaborated. Well, these two “heroes” are helping each other... but they don’t like it! This comic is gruff, a little sloppy, and somewhat offensive, but it tells the type of story you’d expect from this team-up.
Baltimore: The Infernal Train No. 1Baltimore, the WWI captain hunting down a powerful vampire across Europe, waits in Budapest. A priest with a grudge and an unrealistic view of the situation of Europe is on his way to kill Baltimore. The captain waits and sees a giant, sinister train roll into town... and it looks like troubles are only beginning in the Baltimore universe.
Bag it or board it up? Pardon the train-pun, but this beautiful series is really picking up steam. The action and plot are moving forward now, no one nurses their wounds, and everything is going to come to a head soon, it seems.
Hoax Hunters No. 10The Hoax Hunters are a group of researchers, supernatural entities, and powerful personalities. They travel around the globe searching for myths and superstitions. But instead of catching it all on film, they snuff it out and make sure it doesn’t reach the public. In this issue the gang splits ways and goes on separate missions.
Bag it or board it up? This is one of those comics that you can’t miss if you’ve been following along. If not, don’t start with this comic. You won’t have any idea what’s going on and the creators are not afraid to have an issue here and there that isn’t a “hook the new reader” issue. So either back track and keep clear, I’d suggest.
Forever Evil No. 1All the heroes of the DC Universe are gone. We don’t see Batman, Superman, Flash, or Wonder Woman... and uh-oh, all the villains are getting broken out of jail by a group of super-powered impostors from another world/dimension/something. Now, in a world free of heroes, it looks like it’s going to be a villain free-for-all!
Bag it or board it up? With a title like Forever Evil, how could I resist? This comic is actually a lot of fun. Sure, it’s from a magic comic book company, so there’s always the issue of knowing that everything will be okay in the end. But I think this series will feature a lot of great villains getting to be psychopaths and being terrible. What horror fan wouldn’t want to see the entire DC villain pantheon let loose unto the world?