Thursday, August 30, 2012

80-Page Thursdays: Dark Horse Presents #8!


From February, 2012, Dark Horse Presents #8, featuring stories from Brian Wood, Martin Conaghan, Alan Gordon, Evan Dorkin, and more; with art by Thomas Yeates, Jill Thompson, Jimmy Broxton, Simon Rohrmüller, and more. There was a variant cover for the Massive, but I went with the Duncan Fegredo Hellboy one, which leads right into the opener, "An Unmarked Grave." Tying into both Hellboy and B.P.R.D., with regular writers Mike Mignola and John Arcudi; Kate Corrigan investigates Hellboy's disappearance in the ravaged England. Of course, Hellboy died in The Fury #3; but that may not even be the worst news Kate gets...

Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson keep the strong start going with a Beasts of Burden tale, "The View from the Hill." The dogs (and the Orphan, the cat) investigate an unattended flock of sheep, only to discover the flock has a sheepdog, and a secret. It's really good, and although I've only read Beasts a couple times, I wonder if it isn't starting like B.P.R.D.: get to know the characters as they do a bit of demon fighting or ghostbusting, and the series slowly builds to a bigger apocalypse...

There's another chapter of Tony Puryear's Concrete Park, another of Neal Adams' Blood, and the conclusion of this portion of Marked Man from Chaykin. I'm usually not a big fan, but I did like "the Once and Future Tarzan," wherein an older Tarzan is accosted and pulled back into action. I'm also not up enough on the character to recognize the setting, or maybe that's left to be answered--it looked like a sparsely populated future London to me.

The preview for "The Massive" from Brian Wood and Kristian Donaldson left me a bit cold, but you can read the entire thing at io9. I preferred the short "Time to Live," a sci-fi done-in-one. The issue wraps up with the dark humor of "The Many Murders of Miss Cranbourne" and "Skultar."

We're probably going to keep writing up DHP, since as I type this I'm looking forward to #9 with Lobster Johnson and Paul Pope. But I'm really looking forward to Nexus and Evan Dorkin in the book; if they have those and Mignola stuff, it'll be like the book was made just for me.

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