Roughly thirty years ago, eccentric inventor Sir Reginald Hargreeves adopted seven extraordinary children, secluding them in his private estate, where he trained them, honing their unusual powers for ten years until they were ready to emerge as The Umbrella Academy.

Guided only by their loveless father, the children fought crime and fought with each other. One child went missing, another died, and one failed to display any special abilities beyond a certain proficiency on the violin. Over time the team was fractured by strife, the family driven apart.

Thus begins the second story arc for The Umbrella Academy, a brilliant young title published by Dark Horse Comics. This series merges distinctive visuals with a fertile imagination and gives them room to grow and thrive in a world of mad science, mysticism, and supervillainy unfettered by the long-standing continuity straightjackets of more established masked-vigilante comics.

The six-issue Apocalypse Suite introduces the Academy, making good use of flashbacks and dialog to flesh out the setting and give us the right back-story to make the characters human enough to be compelling while remaining detached enough to remain largely mysterious. The current series, Dallas carries forward from what could have been a perfectly-acceptable one-shot mini series, and is holding up well so far, exploring the disappearance and reappearance of 00.05.

Absolutely worth a read. Pick up the trade paperback. Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba do some outstandin work here.

A few weeks back, the folks over at the THAC0 Podcast talked a bit about when it’s time to stop following a title. I find that it’s when the series stops being what I liked about it. I’ve commented on this before in regards to anime, but I think I’ve just about gotten to that point for the Order of the Stick.

Rich Burlew started the strip as a way to poke fun at the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, its game culture, its rules, the tropes of the genre. It was funny. It was insightful. It provided a few nice little pauses in my week. For the past several months, this has been more the exception than the rule. The Order of the Stick has drifted away from its comedic roots and has strayed into the realm of dramatic fiction. Wandering off for a couple of strips into serious exposition in order to deliver the main characters to a fresh set of comedic material is certainly fine by me. I can wade through some un-funny text for a while to get back to the good stuff.

The recent reappearance of Belkar the hateful violent little Halfling has served to highlight how far the value of this strip has slipped. We’ve gone from “I think I missed a spot check” to this:

You’re not missing anything subtle. It just isn’t funny. Or heart-wrenching. Or entertaining.

I must admit that it’s been over a decade since I’ve followed the inter-title continuity of western comic books. I couldn’t tell you which titles were involved in the Marvel Civil War, or give you a cogent description of what DC’s Countdown was about. So I don’t really know who Terra is. Or was. Apparently she had something to do with the Teen Titans. I inferred this while reading the four-shot series Terra.

Terra follows a young newcomer to the superhero scene of the DC continuity. She has been very busy recently, popping up from the Earth to save the day from all manner of subterrannean threats, saving coal miners, staunching rogue lava flows, et cetera. It’s all very heroic, and the behavior of the new heroine is markedly naive.

This series does something that I had grown alien back in the late 1980’s and 90’s when I was regularly following the convoluted plot conceits of superhumans-in-tights: it doesn’t really explain things. I don’t know who the first or second Terra were. I don’t know what their powers were, who they associated themselves with, what perils the faced, overcame, or were defeated by. I have no idea how powerful they were on a scale of The Question to Superman. Terra doesn’t bother telling me. It’s important that there were two previous metahumans named Terra that had similar powers to this title’s protagonist. That’s all I needed to know, and the writers were kind enough to leave it at that. If I hadn’t known who Hawkman or Geoforce were, it wouldn’t have mattered and they didn’t tell me. Thank you, Gray and Palmiotti, for keeping the continuity in your pants.

The art, by Amanda Connor, is interesting. Stylized with a fair amount of detail but leavin enough room for the colorist to get some detail in, she does a great job conveying motion, keeping it easy to follow from frame to frame in a way that many artists often fail to. The faces, however, showed some inconsistency that was a little disappointing. All four covers were great, but Connor falls into the trap of defining a character by a few overt features (costume, hair color & style), and lets things blur from there. In some scenes featuring Power Girl, I was certain that a change in coloring work would have rendered the two superheronies indistinguishable.

Overall, I found Terra to be a refreshing glimpse into the DC Universe. It didn’t smack me about the face and neck with seventy years of back-story. It told a story from beginning to end, showed character growth (terribly rare in superhero comics), and ended appropriately. The artwork was solid if not perfect, and is certainly worth picking up either individually or as its inevitable TPB.

Hey look, I found another cartoon to watch. Hooray for me. How bout I tell you about it?

Chaos;Head is about a (wait for it) socially-awkward high school boy and a (wait, wait, you’ve never heard this before) bunch of beautiful women who intrude in his life, resulting in (oh precious suspense) awkward semi-romantic situations intended to titillate the socially-awkward male demographic. This is all terribly formulaic, all very focus-group-tested and sanitary.

But this isn’t a romantic comedy, no no no, this is a suspense/thriller. There is a string of bizarre deaths in Shibuya, where the protagonist lives. The protagonist is an unreliable witness, which is the key leverage used in telling the story. He is prone to delusions. He lives in a cargo container on the roof of a building where he collects anime-related figurines and plays video games all day. He has an imaginary friend (an anime character he thinks is his wife). He thinks somebody is watching him, sometimes even in the solitude of his own room.

The pacing of Chaos;Head is excellent. The intro and ending theme music are hideous. The character designs are visually pretty typical for a romantic comedy, which adds to the creepiness of the paranoid tale of supernatural horror. The invisible super-swords are retarded. The production quality is uneven; sometimes nice but often lackluster. Clearly this is a product of a production crew with a limited budget and timeline trying to cram a very complicated video game plot into half-hour chunks. So far they’re making an admirable run of it. I look forward to the next episode, and so should you.

Bonus points for including nutty URLs on-screen that you can actually visit online. Nice.

As hoped, after fifty episodes, Code Geass is done. Lelouche vi Britannia’s struggle is over, and we have our winners and losers. There are certainly some plot threads that were left unresolved — the interaction between Lloyd and Rashata comes readily to mind — but not many, and none that were prominent to the story. The final plot twist was appropriately dramatic, if not unpredictable. Not to spoil anything, but calling his plan “Zero Requiem” was a dead giveaway.

Over all, I’d give Code Geass an A-. Very much a worthwhile investment of about twenty-four hours of viewing time, a series I’ll likely remember fondly several years from now, and one of the few multi-season shows I’ve been willing to see through to the end recently. I give them credit for maintaining animation quality over the haul and for finding such an entertaining way to mix together so many Japanese animation tropes (particularly the ones I normally avoid). Partial credit for easing off a bit (at least towards the end) from the continuous escalation of scale and power level so typical of the action genre. Deductions for the overabundance of “just as planned” hare-brained plot twists.

Fourty-nine episodes into Code Geass and I just can’t wait for the final episode. Not out of a great burning edge-of-my-seat anticipation of the latest cliffhanger. No. At this point I’m watching with the morbid curiosity of a driver that slows down and glances over at the upended sedan in the median. That guilty little tug that makes you need to know something you don’t really want to know. I’ve already remarked on the silly procession of shocking revelations, crosses, double-crosses, triple-, quadruple- and pentuple-crosses. It’s still going. Happily, it has been several episodes since any new loose ends have been introduced.

Code Geass has been an interesting show, very well-produced and executed despite its manifold thematic problems. Its producers took a broad array of weaknesses and forged them into strengths, but could not seem to get past its cast of over-the-top, too-clever-by-half leading characters. Here’s to hoping there won’t be a third season!

It’s been a while since I’ve commented on any anime. That would be because I’m really only following Code Geass at the moment. This past week saw the twentieth episode of its second season, and I am convinced that the writing staff has been smoking crack. The number of paper-thin plot devices characters has grown completely out of control, with a couple dozen conflicting interests butting heads, and so many plot twists that things have devolved into a simple matter of “what’s this week’s crazy revelation going to be?” This show has truly been a guilty pleasure, what with its Clamp character designs, giant robots, anti-western sentiments, melodrama, love triangles, weaboo fightan action, magical superpowers, and its mess of stupendously-competent characters that keep preventing each other from accomplishing anything.

A big part of me hopes Code Geass ends permanently soon. Wrap up the main thrust of the plot (Lelouche vs. Charles) and be done with it. I’m accepting recommendations for titles that have the following qualities: not a high-school romantic comedy, not tragically hip, reasonably interesting protagonist, reasonably unpredictable plot. Haven’t seen a lot of those floating around lately.

The release schedule was a little halted, but the Madame Mirage plot arc has reached its natural conclusion with issue six. The Kenneth Rocafort artwork held up nicely throughout, and the tale is wrapped up nicely with a rather predictable but well-executed climactic showdown and denouement.

A trade paperback version is slated for later this year, which I recommend if you get the chance. It is well past time that American comic books get past the tired old protagonists and villains of the past. The world only needs so many Batman, Spiderman, and X-Men stories.