HERO COMICS 2012

Review by: akamuu

What did the
iFanboy
community think?

32
Pulls
Avg Rating: 3.3
 
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Story by Kevin Eastman, Tom Ziuko, Chris Ryall, Russ Heath, Christian Gossett, Alan Kupperberg, Richard Starkings, & Robert Washington
Art by Kevin Eastman, Gerry Acerno, Ashley Wood, Russ Heath, Christian Gossett, Alan Kupperberg, Dave Sim, & Chris Ivy
Cover by J. Scott Campbell

Size: 0 pages
Price: 3.99

This week is so light, I think it must have been huffing helium. This made for a great opportunity to read some books I might not have picked up.

I’m a big fan of The Hero Initiative. I’m really glad they exist, and hope they continue to be successful in supporting comic book creators in need.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this book is going to bring in a lot of cash. The CBLDF anthologies seemed to draw in the big names, and had them work on clever mini stories. This anthology does bring in some big names, but it seems more like they threw together an assortment of thematically different and, frankly, dull stories just to have something to sell. Eastman opens with a TMNT story about two of the turtles racing. The art is very Eastman Turtles, which is nostalgically nice to look at but also shows that his art hasn’t evolved much in twenty-five years.

The Tom Ziuko/Gerry Acerno story is a bit more what I expected. It’s an artist’s experience in a hospital. It’s a little hokeu, but I imagined there’d be some hokiness when I picked up the book.

Chris Ryall and Ashley Wood certainly have four pages with pictures on it in the book. I think they’re supposed to be funny.

The Russ Heath and Darwyn cook collaboration is another example of the kind of thing I expected when I picked up the book. I wish there had been more pages like it.

The Gosset Wagner pages are fine. A philosophical war story. Hard to pull off in four pages. It looks nice but I think it would be better suited to a longer page length.

I really don’t want to hate on the Kupperberg/Ziuko/Morelli page. One of its very hammered home points is that Kupperberg lost a lot of work because his style was no longer en vogue. That’s very apparent here. It’s very silver age moral moral moral plain speak. It’s not, and never has been an era of comics I’ve enjoyed. But I understand why that style appeals to other people, and imagine they’d enjoy this.

Dave Sim’s Elephantmen…The man can draw. And I do love Elephantmen, but this was as lazy a five page story as I can imagine. I’d much rather have had him draw five pages of Ebony crossing a street and not saying anything. This looked like someone spent days drawing the same panel over and over (but zooming the camera in and out) and then went “Oh, shit. I was supposed to write something…uhh, let’s go for zen?”

The last actual story of the book is another one page story about what The Hero Initiative does. This time by Robert Washington and Chris Ivy. It made me wish The Hero Initiative had spent their money on ads in comics plugging a website. And that their site was a collection of these stories with links to the artists’ pages and maybe a Paypal Donate button.

Again, I’d really like to gush over how great this book is, the way I did for the CBDLF anthologies. Instead, I’d advise not picking this up, but instead going directly to their donation page and sending them what you can afford.

I’m plugging in fives in the review for the intention behind the comic. I hope if they do another comic next year and it’s as cool as last year’s seemed (I’m really sorry I wasn’t reading comics at that time. That one looked amazing.)

Story: 5 - Excellent
Art: 5 - Excellent

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