Previously I gave a conditional endorsement of Stein’s Gate based on an assumption that everything would derail after a half-dozen episodes or so. Twelve episodes in, we are finally at crossroads of sorts. This show is either just about to faceplant into a steaming pile of failure or soar into greatness. I stand corrected. This series has remained awesome for at least twice as long as anticipated.

Tune in next week to find out how Hououin Kyouma uses seemingly-ordinary kitchen appliances to challenge murderers, turncoats, international conspiracies, and fate itself!

Hey! You, there! Remember Chaos;Head? Me neither. Not very well, at least. You see, it had a really good start with a mysterious-but-cool premise, nice presentation, passable character design, and I was initially quite excited to see where it was all going. Then everything fell apart. By the time I found out what was actually going on I was seriously disappointed and the show ground down into an inevitably lackluster ending.

Stein’s Gate just started up this past week, and is based on a visual novel by the same team that brought us Chaos;Head. Again we’ve got a mysterious premise: our protagonist, an under-funded mad scientist, goes to attend a lecture on time travel. A satellite falls from the sky. Some woman he knows from the academic world ends up getting stabbed. Upon returning to his lab, the mad scientist discovers that the lecture he attended had never happened, that he shouldn’t have witnessed the satellite crash, and maybe he’s a little more crazy than he thought he was. Or maybe there’s some time travel happening, after all.

Oh, and some bananas are put through a microwave. This is very important to the protagonist’s research, you see.

I’m generally opposed to time travel fiction. It encourages some of the worst narrative excesses and discussion of the topic nearly always involves ridiculous notions of the supposedly-necessary consequences of paradox and alternate timelines. Fie on all that nonsense.

One episode in, the main characters appear to be the aforementioned mad scientist, his absent-minded female assistant, and a stereotypical overweight computer geek. Their adversary appears to be the paranoia of their own leader, who believes The Organization is moving against them, attempting to stifle their important scientific work that will overthrow the social order of the world. A little more slapstick and we would see shades of Excel Saga.

Give it a shot. I fully expect this to be awesome for at least five episodes.

Season two of Wakfu is well underway, and somehow I neglected to ever post about this odd French cartoon. Based on a sequel to a French MMORPG (Dofus), Wakfu’s first season followed the adventures of Yugo, a young boy seeking out his long-lost family with the help of a number of companions, each based on character archetypes from the game. Alongside this was the story of a megalomaniac time mage hell-bent on accumulating enough Wakfu (a kind of mystical power source found in living things) to send himself back in time to right a past wrong.

The art style is distinct and the animation style somewhat odd to start with. You see, Wakfu is generated not by traditional pen-and-paper means but via Flash animation. An excellent sample to preview the stylistic character designs and animation style would be from season one, episode one, when Nox the time mage confronts an old man with an infant Yugo. The production company clearly has a certain European flair to it.

Character development is slow in coming, refusing to touch the main characters nearly at all over the course of a full season. I understand the necessity of this, as the show is practically an advertisement for Ankama’s upcoming Wakfu computer game (sequel to Dofus). Each of Yugo’s companions needs to remain a paragon of his character class; Ruel must remain an unrepentant greedy Enutrof, Tristepin must remain a headstrong overconfident Iop. It just wouldn’t do to confuse the RPG-buying public about what they’re getting into.

Season two picks up after shortly after the first one trailed off, with the same core cast of protagonists. Just enough time has passed for their deeds and heroic sacrifices to have become a legend of sorts. I highly recommend checking this series out.

Postscript: I find it highly entertaining to hear French voice actors actually use the phrase “ooh la-la” in dialog. It’s like hearing a Mexican say “ay caramba.”

Every once in a while a cartoon comes along where the production team is having fun with it. They probably aren’t all having fun with it (slaving away at in-between frames can’t be pleasant), but some productions find an outlet for at least the appearance of joy. In the case of Kore wa Zombie desu ka, this can be readily found in its bumpers.

Episode one brings us the following:

These are basically just portraits of the male protagonist (the titular zombie) and one of the female leads, a chainsaw-wielding magical girl. It’s just a sight gag. No big deal.
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What the hell did I just watch? Why do I feel compelled to subject myself to more of it? Rampaging juvenile delinquent becomes the foster father of a demonic toddler.

There’s a lot wrong with American popular comics these days. DC‘s continuity is a mess. Marvel has its own issues with too much cross-pollination between titles in some places and a bizarre lack of connection in others (did the rest of Earth-616 notice a bajillion Nimrod super-Sentinels descending on a small island within sight of San Francisco?). One area in which they are thriving rather than languishing is in the campy — in an ironic, hipster way — old-timey heroes. Enter Gorilla Man and M-11 of Atlas.

Gorilla Man, AKA the Immortal Gorilla Man, AKA General Hale is a former soldier-of-fortune and big-game hunter that sought out immortality and got it, along with a curse to live forever as a talking Gorilla never to grow old or sick. M-11, the 11th in a line of Menacer Robots, was designed as a 1950’s sci-fi terror weapon with a death-ray visor and electric hands, but its creator instilled in it a free will and conscience. Each has a basic one-shot fantastic-tales premise, and each makes an excellent addition to the current Marvel line-up with its tangled web of interpersonal relationships and continuity baggage

The rest of the Atlas cast are endearing in their own ways, but M-11 and Gorilla Man shine a bright action-adventure light where the repeatedly re-imagined mainstays of Marvel just seem inconsistent and muddy when they’re mean to be gritty or dark. Daredevil’s friends are all worried about the morality of killing Bullseye (a supremely-dangerous sociopath with a history of murdering Daredevil’s loved ones). Nightcrawler couldn’t countenance Cyclops authorizing the use of lethal force after hundreds of issues of watching Wolverine put his claws through fools’ heads. When Gorilla Man picks up an assault rifle with his foot and mows down twenty goons, it isn’t grim, it’s awesome. M-11 rarely whips out his full-strength death ray, but when it does we don’t get five panels of crying over it; the bad guys had it coming and the story isn’t going to dwell on it.

I’m quite pleased to see Gorilla Man and The Uranian catch their own short-lived solo series, and hope to see one for M-11 some time soon.

If there’s anything sillier than Japanese stereotypes about westerners (particularly Americans) in Japan, it’s Japanese stereotypes applied to westerners in their native environment. With a little assistance from the great Stan Lee, things hang together pretty well. Heroman is the tale of Joey Jones, adolescent loser, who finds a discarded robot toy that he patches back together. On the eve of a terrible alien invasion, the raggedy remote-control robot transforms into a hulking heroic figure, which Joey dubs “Heroman.” If you haven’t noticed yet, the names are awful. Awful even for a Stan Lee production.

The story takes place in an anonymous Californian city, so right away there need to be overcrowded freeways, skateboards, a beach, and black people. The main character is right out of Japanese love-triangle central casting, aside from the painfully-American name: he’s rather effeminate, shy, and unpopular. His main love interest is very baseball-and-apple pie in that she’s a blue-eyed, blonde cheerleader with an independent streak by the name of Lina Davis. Naturally she wears her cheerleader uniform everywhere. The small-time nemesis is her brother, all-American muscle-bound captain of the football team. He’s always wearing shorts and his jersey, a nod to the casual atmosphere expected of western schools. His henchman is short, overweight, and spoiled by wealthy parents. All very typical. Add in Joey’s buddy Psy (that really should read “Cy” as in “Cy Young,” but hey), an ambiguously-swarthy skater type with gigantic hair, and Professor Denton, the science instructor who accidentally brought the alien apocalypse down to Earth, and the cast is pretty much complete.

Heroman promises to offer some of the best and worst of two genres: heroic shonen anime and Marvel-style American comics. I specifically mention Marvel here, because there’s a certain flavor that Stan Lee is known for that shows up pretty well here. The classic distinction between DC superheroes like Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman and Marvel superheroes like Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man is that while DC superheroes have superheroic problems, Marvel superheroes have mundane problems as well. Sure, Superman has to juggle his secret identity, but he doesn’t wrestle with that like Iron Man does with his drinking problem, or how Spider-Man struggles with his job and love life. Joey Jones has much more Peter Parker in him than Bruce Wayne. He’s a poor kid working a part-time job at a diner. He’s only got one friend at school is looked down on by his other classmates. He lives alone with his grandmother and pines over a photo of himself with his father.

Stan Lee doesn’t keep things entirely on the down-beat, though. In typical Japanese fashion, there’s a cute and popular girl that he likes, but in typical Stan Lee fashion she already quite clearly likes him. They take the obligatory romantic awkwardness of a made-for-Japan show and recast it. Joey’s not shy around Lina because he’s afraid she doesn’t like him. He’s shy around her because her big brother is going to kick is pathetic little loser ass. Basically Lina’s brother is to Joey what Flash was to Peter Parker. There’s nothing new under the sun, but that’s not a bad thing.

As for the superheroics, we get a toy robot that turns into a hulking armored robot that’s super-strong and brave and all those things Joey doesn’t think of himself as. Rather than piloting Heroman directly, or even having a remote control rig, Joey talks to it. The toy robot has a little remote control, but when Heroman transforms, it encases Joey’s hand and forearm, displaying an LCD interface. So far as I can tell, Joey doesn’t have a lot of direct influence over his superpowered buddy; a situation develops and an icon appears on the controller. Joey shouts something like “attack!” or “burst!” or “finish!” and slaps his free hand on the icon. Presumably he’s Heroman’s safety valve, or has an implicit veto authority.

Each episode ends with charmingly cheesy “to be continued” cliffhanger. This is a good thing.

Spoilers follow.
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With Gray, Palmiotti, and Conner’s run now at an end after one full year, it seems like a good time to look back at Power Girl issues one through twelve. For those unfamiliar with the character, Power Girl is a female version of Superman that somehow avoided being Super Girl or Super Woman. With cleavage. There’s no avoiding that DC wants to put this character on covers to draw the eye of lonely young men and dirty old men alike.

My first recollection of her was from the old Justice League Europe series, where I recall her repeatedly provoking and being provoked by Guy Gardener. If you aren’t familiar with Guy Gardener, it suffices for my purposes to describe him as the chauvanist pig Green Lantern from the 1980’s. Power Girl and Guy made good foils for each other, because they have somewhat aggressive personalities, and both are derivative characters that refuse to behave like they are.

Anyhow, in 2009 a new Power Girl series came out that, like Terra before it, was co-written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, and illustrated by Amanda Conner. Also like Terra, it manages to side-step the landmine field that is DC’s continuity-porn train-wreckage of a history. This is an accomplishment given Power Girl’s role in the Infinite Crisis of Worlds in Crisis Infinitely. They simply and accessibly put forward a character that gradually putting her life together both as a super-heroine and a secret-identity entrepreneur.

The title goes through four plot arcs, tying up as tidily as if they expected the comic to be canceled entirely after its first year.

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  In Gorilla Warfare we see Power Girl face off against the evil Ultra-Humanite, a mad genius trapped in an albino gorilla’s body. He wants to perform a brain transplant operation, taking over Power Girl’s mighty Kryptonian body. Given the blatant cheesecake factored into her character design, this helps get the series off to a properly humorous start.

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  In Space Girls Gone Wild, Power Girl gets caught up in running battle between three alien party girls and a space-cop that’s trying to bring them in for justice. There are explosions and misunderstandings and everything is pretty light-hearted and funny.

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  One of the better stories I’ve run into in comics in the past yearh, Lust in Space has Vartox, a hairy-checked macho space-lord from a doomed civilization (the rest of his species has gone sterile) seeks out Power Girl for her… fertility. An excellent flip-side of the first plot arc, a well-intentioned but ignorant male seeks her out for pretty much exactly what you’d expect a free-love stud with an 80’s mustache and a speedo to want from her. There are explosions and misunderstandings.

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  In War on Terra, things come back around to the first story, with the villains seeking to turn Power Girl’s buddy and protégé Terra against her. Throughout the series Terra has been a frequent sidekick both in the super-heroics and civilian down-time, and we get the obligatory “what if they two of them turned on each other” scenario unfolding and resolving itself as you’d want it to. There are explosions but not so much on the misunderstandings

The series does a very good job pacing between rock-em-sock-em caped heroism and super-villainy and the mundane world of a secret identity. Early on, the secret-identity stories did an excellent job highlighting how superhero comics can be analogs to other tales, with the Ultra-Humanite mirrored nicely by an abrasive job interview.

Amanda Conner’s art is much as it was in Terra. The action scenes were enthusiastic and over-the-top. The characters were delightfully expressive, though there is still the tendency to draw pretty females strongly similar to each other. Conner can make two athletic young men look distinctive, but two attractive young women need to be distinguished by hair color and costume.

Due to the cheesecake factor, this may not be something you want up on your bookshelf for all to see, but it’s a fun read. There are a couple of scenes that depict brain surgery or somebody losing an arm a bit more graphically than you’d want from a kid’s comic, but otherwise this here’s a prime example of what used to be good about comics that mostly just doesn’t apply any more. This isn’t grim and edgy. It isn’t littered with big-name cross-overs. It’s just some good (mostly) clean fun.