This week the Wednesday Comics Reviews team tackles some killer new #1s with Assorted Crisis Events, Dark Pyramid, and Welcome to Twilight. We also look ahead at a new titles eligible for pre-order, specifically Adventure Time and Arcana Royale. Plus, as always…The Prog Report!
Assorted Crisis Events #1
Writer: Deniz Camp
Artist: Eric Zawadzki
Colorist: Jordie Bellaire
Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
Designer: Tom Muller
Publisher: Image Comics
Review by Sean Dillon
In a recent interview with Empire Magazine, Mike Leigh mused what he would do with a James Bond movie. The filmmaker, known for his social realist cinema, pitched the film as “The entire film would be James Bond visiting his elderly mother in a suburban house, spending a bit of time with her, and then leaving.”
Assorted Crisis Events isn’t quite that project. For starters, our lead character, Ashley, is not the action movie heroine out to stop the evil plot. Rather, she’s an ordinary person caught up in a rather mixed up world. A waitress stuck living alone in an apartment beset by an uncaring film crew out to make whatever the next postapocalyptic blockbuster is out there. All she wants is to get her clock fixed.
Instead, the world ends.
This is quite possibly the first great comic of the year. An absolute barnstormer of a book full of inventive ideas, clever sequences, and one of the most jaw dropping punchlines of the year. While it might be obvious to cite the rising star of Deniz Camp as delivering on the pitch of “What if Alec by way of Final Crisis?,” the true star of the book is the collaboration between artist Eric Zawadzki and colorist Jordie Bellaire.
Frequently throughout the issue, Bellaire opts to deemphasize the color work being done, muting backgrounds and even foregrounds to have everything blend together to highlight the disjointed blandness of a matte painting that is swiftly undercut with the sharpness of apocalyptic decay. Combined with the clean and clear pencil work by Zawadzki, and you have some of the most stark images of the year.
Where Camp’s previous efforts opted for the grotesque and flamboyant, the world presented in Assorted Crisis Events remains grounded, yet nevertheless unsettling. One sequence involving Ashley running afoul with the police jolts the reader with its harsh cruelty that a page of nothing but caped clowns flying about, talking about “anti-life” and “Crisis Energy” simply can’t.
This is the going to be one of the best books of the year, and you should get on the ground floor of it immediately.
Dark Pyramid #1
Writer: Paul Tobin
Art: PJ Holden
Colors: Sara Colella
Letters: Taylor Esposito
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
Review by Clyde Hall
Hooky Hidlalgo’s amassed a very dedicated online viewership. As an adventurist, he’s chosen as his latest daring feat a solo climbing expedition up Mt. Denali in Alaska. And he livestreams this solitary, unassisted feat of rock climbing for the at-home audience, which includes his girlfriend, Becca Burgos. After taking a fall, Hooky reorients himself to continue but stumbles across something completely unexpected: A hidden dark pyramid covered in strange hieroglyphs. Still livestreaming, he enters the foreboding structure and narrates what he sees within the deep shadows of the pyramid’s interior. Narration that becomes panicked cries just before Hooky’s feed goes dark.
With viewer funding and online donations, Becca arrives in Foothorn, nearest Alaskan settlement to Hooky’s Denali ascent, a day and a half later. She’s determined to find him and get answers regarding the dark pyramid. But there are obstacles. Locals may know more about the mystery structure than they admit to. And Hooky’s fans have descended on the town as well, taking up all the small town’s lodgings and accommodation.
This five-issue miniseries accomplishes in its premiere something I love in supernatural mysteries. That is, it constructs a realistic world as the setting. If the official line of the local law enforcement tracks, and if morbidly curious online viewers act on fannish impulse, and if a very worried girlfriend lets her concern overrule good judgment, admit it. You have a reasonably plausible background for all that’s to follow. And with that, writer Paul Tobin can bring forth supernatural threats that share the plausibility. If the world depicted is so very real, how can creatures bumping furiously in the night be anything less?
The first Tobin series I read was Bunny Mask back in 2021, and he was already adeptly juggling the everyday with the extraordinary in his horror tales then. If anything, he’s become even more practiced since. This introduction issue sketches out the situation masterfully and immediately hits Hooky’s trail running.
Maybe the best illustration of this talent is in Becca’s first contact with the Foothorn Territory Police. She’s mortified to discover they didn’t send out a search party after Hooky’s live feed went dark. And yes, they seemed aware of the situation sometime after the fact. But with a brutal storm coming in, the search-and-rescue folks reasoned that endangering many people to find a foolish outsider who rejected common safety precautions of a team, equipment, or climb partner would be equally foolish. It’s real-life reasoning I’ve seen before, and it’s hard finding fault when people have willingly placed themselves into dangerous situations for fame or profit. If a tourist unfamiliar with the terrain unwittingly became endangered, the same rescuers would move heaven and earth. An influencer betting solely on his own skills to wow his audience? Less so.
Becca’s response is equally understandable. Someone she cares deeply about may be injured or dying, so she’s going out to look even if she has to go alone, approaching storm be damned. Which she’s advised against by authorities, given how that same mindset served Hooky. And even Becca must admit, on further reflection, it’s not an unreasonable outlook. Naturally there’s a lot more than this going on under the table regarding the locals, and the true dangers of Hooky’s discovery and Becca’s predicament begin surfacing soon after.
PJ Holden on art further grants the story a realistic, lived-in aesthetic which devolves into grotesquery and horrific imagery later on, when the time of soul-swallowing secrets wrapped in Denali’s shadow arrive. It’s also good seeing PJ indulge us with background details in nearly every panel. The setting is vast, even for the great outdoors, and the wilderness of Foothorn may well turn out to be a character in itself. This background detailing helps breathe life into a scenic landscape, one it’s easy to believe outsiders would get lost in.
Sara Colella’s colors deserve a mention as well. In this kind of horror story there’s a time for dusky surroundings, indoor and out. There’s also time of sunlight reflected like a spotlight off snow-covered peaks and mountain passes. She delivers both with equal skill, and her work on the lighting grants the book another refined layer of realism.
Part of the mystery presented in Dark Pyramid rests in its intended scope. Despite the mountainous terrain, wi-fi and streaming work. Images of some sort of lost, ancient structure have hit the internet because of it. Will Becca be livestreaming Things Humankind Was Not Meant to Know? And if so, how will the world be changed in the wake of nonhuman, maybe nonmortal, entities slithering among us? Satisfying answers to questions like these might elude many writers of modern horror. However, this creative team is up to taking the storyline that direction if they choose. And that should tell you white knucklers all you need to know.
Welcome to Twilight #1
Writer: Matt Fraction, with plotting also by Patton Oswalt and Jordan Blum
Art: Mike Allred
Colors: Laura Allred
Letters: Nate Piekos
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Review by Clyde Hall
The Minor Threats-verse has been described as a superhero reality sandwiched somewhere between The Boys and Astro City. But with this 4-issue anthology premiere, the overtones also come with an underpinning of Wild Cards. In that reality, an alien bioweapon was released on Earth and resulted in a ‘wild card virus’ infecting humanity. Many died, some were unaffected. But a smaller number drew jokers, granting them freakish appearances or crippling disabilities while bestowing powers and abilities which could be either useless or useful. The luckiest of the infected drew aces, a power set which might allow temporal travel, superhuman strength, invulnerability, telekinesis, or a tossed salad of several such combinations.
With such wide-ranging abilities, not everyone became superheroes or powered criminals. Many just tried getting on with their lives as normally as possible. Those with exotic appearances might even find work in movies, television, or modeling. Many stage and screen promoters offered employment to jokers as ‘monsters’ requiring no makeup or special effects. Human practicality led you into playing the wild card you were dealt.
The Minor Threats universe often mirrors similar struggles between the powered haves and have-nots. Matt Fraction has taken a similar approach with his E! True Hollywood Story treatment of boomer Benjamin Bronkowitz. Born into a world of metahumans and normals, he somehow straddled the line with a perfect set of white, angelic wings but a normal human body too heavy for flight. Purely vestigial attachments, his wings didn’t grant him powers useable as a superhero. So he just played one on TV.
Or at least a crime fighter, half of the cool oceanside buddy-cop duo in the 1980s action series Wings and Prayer. In the world of Minor Threats, Bronk (stage name Ben Bronkman) was the Don Johnson of a Miami Vice detective series, and his costar was a dead ringer for Philip Michael Thomas.
Cut to the modern day, and Bronk’s eking a living on the nostalgia circuit of convention appearances and Cameo requests. He and his manager, Swifty, await an Adam West-style second wave of stardom. The Tinsel Town siren call of a series reboot or movie treatment has them holding on for one more spin of the celebrity wheel. Enter a damsel in damp distress, one bad crime boss called Man-Face, and life for Bronk begins looking like a seamy, twisted imitation of art! Well, of Hollywood at least.
If you’re a Fraction fan, you know the absurdist lengths he’s explored in books like Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen: Who Killed Jimmy Olsen? And you probably know the sort of Church of the SubGenius romp ahead when he’s unchained from continuity to blaze his own path. And at any point suspension of disbelief might overextend, Fraction’s quick on waving the “It was the ‘80s” wand, an effective cantrip for translating this era’s Zeitgeist into the indulgent glitz of the former.
The first issue definitely delivers all this, neatly wrapped into a brown paper, neo-hardboiled package. Mike and Laura Allred art is a perfect collaboration of sensibility and style. It’ll fire off warm Ff 1: Fantastic Faux fuzzies. Also, you’ll appreciate the transition they put Bronk through, from sleek ‘80s detective star to woebegone Hofflike hanger-on, literally panel-to-panel.
The final product feels slightly rushed, pop culture fast food that fills while still leaving a little something out. Bits of dark humor that don’t quite land. One panel of Bronk sans his ever-present wings. But in its premiere issue, From the World of Minor Threats: Welcome to Twilight still satisfies in the unique way only a Fraction-Allred collab can.
Rapid Wednesday Comics Reviews
Babs #6 (AHOY Comics): If you’ve been reading and loving Babs, as I have, you are going to absolute love this last issue, which ties everything together and gives this miniseries the exact right finale. The book is written by Garth Ennis with art by Jacen Burrows, colors by Andy Troy, and letters by Rob Steen. It’s been an outrageous send-up of our modern political moment in a fantasy setting. That in itself isn’t anything all that new, but this book pushes it to really funny places by also incorporating some aspects of toxic Internet culture in surprising ways. It’s been great, with Ennis going to his gross-out bag basically each issue to deliver some deeply funny set pieces. If you liked those, you get the best one yet in this issue, which I will not spoil here. Overall, Babs was one of the funniest comics I’ve read in years, and it gets my full recommendation. If you missed it in singles, get the trade when it hits. —Zack Quaintance- Star Trek – Lower Decks #5 (IDW Publishing): The Star Trek: Lower Decks series continues to embody the gold standard for Franchise comics in its fifth issue. Like the previous two issues, this one is written by Ryan North, with art by Jack Lawrence, colors by Charlie Kirchoff, letters by Clayton Cowles and design & production by Johanna Nattalie. As established by the earlier issues in the series, this is another “part 1” of a two-part story (presumably two parts, since issue 7 is by a different creative team), and I’m very eager to see how “Desperate Times” turns out. This time travel story, which could have easily been an episode of the show, is packed with references to Trek canon new and old. In particular, I loved the way it built on a certain crossover episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The final splash page is a great showcase for Lawrence and Kirchoff, as are the various panels throughout the issue in which the timelines shift. As expected, Cowles does an excellent job with the lettering. And as for the back matter, there is an interview with the artist (Ángel Unzueta) and colorist (Marissa Louise) for Star Trek: Defiant… but I’m still dying for some Lower Decks-specific back matter, like the pages that finished off the original three-issue comic run. Once again, any Lower Decks fan who isn’t venturing to their local comic shop to pick up this series is missing out! —Avery Kaplan
FOC Watch
These books are currently available for pre-order.
Adventure Time #1
Writer: Nick Winn, Derek M Ballard
Artist: Nick Winn, Derek M Ballard
Letterer: Shawn Lee
Publisher: Oni Press
Publication Date: April 9, 2025
Review by Jordan Jennings
Note: This review focuses on the primary feature of Adventure Time #1– Best of Buds part 1 by Writer/ artist Nick Winn. The issue does include a back-up feature by Derek M. Ballard, but that was not made available for review at the time of publication.
Oh Glob, Adventure Time is back with new comics from ONI Press with Adventure Time #1 by Nick Winn and Derek M. Ballard. This issue represents the start of the Best of Buds story arc that features Finn and Jake questing for the mythical tome: The Enchiridion. This quest promises to be filled with danger and adventure as you never know who you’ll run into in the Land of Ooo.
Nick Winn does a fantastic job in this issue capturing the look and feel of the Adventure Time tv show. Winn captures the character’s voices and distinct visual body language with a surprisingly high fidelity. To be honest, I haven’t heard much about Nick Winn before. So for this review I went to check out Winn’s past credits and I was amazed to find their extensive work on character design for other tv series such as Craig of the Creek and their own indie comics work. Their eye for animation is apparent in this issue.
Winn illustrates the book with a lot of kinetic energy, be it Finn and Jake bouncing around between panels or the small actions of background characters. It gives the comic a great sense of life and energy. One of my favorite techniques that Winn uses to instill energy into this comic is playing around with the comics medium in general. There are multiple instances where the action literally breaks the panel and wraps through the gutters. While this can be risky in breaking the visual language of the comic, it works well here as Winn uses it to bring the reader’s eyes across the page and direct the reader to the action. It is a visual treat of a comic that is just as vibrant as the tv show.
As for the writing, Winn plays to the character’s strengths and opts to let the visuals do the heavy lifting. It is nice to see an artist avoid the pitfall of over-writing their comic.As previously mentioned, the character voices are inline with the tv series and while it may run counter to the show’s continuity, it feels very much in universe of the show and fitting of a series that can be interpreted as a series of myths and legends that don’t exactly have to blend together seamlessly.
Overall, Adventure Time #1 is off to a great start for the series in continuing the spirit of the show and comics that have come before it. Nick Winn does a stellar job bringing these characters to life on the page and is a must read for any fan of the tv series.
Final Verdict: Buy
Arcana Royale #1
Writer: Cullen Bunn
Artist: A.C. Zamudio
Colorist: Bill Crabtree
Letterer: Josh Reed
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Publication Date: April 23, 2025
Review by Zack Quaintance
There is, perhaps, no more reliable comic book than a horror story written by Cullen Bunn. As Garth Ennis is to war comics, Bunn is to horror, producing a seemingly-endless supply of spooky stories, year after year after year. This spring, Bunn is teaming with artist A.C. Zamudio (colored by Bill Crabtree and lettered by Josh Reed, who are two of the best at what they do) on Arcana Royale #1, which takes his usual horror leanings and twists them into something slightly different.
Indeed, Arcana Royale uses some of Bunn’s repertoire of horror storytelling around its edges as it forges into supernatural thriller territory (almost a heist story, but not quite that), delivering a first issue that publisher Dark Horse bills as The Sandman meets Rounders. And that definitely seems like an apt comparison, starting with the page 2-3 spread that gives us a set of fantastical poker players in a smokey room, playing cards. From there we learn our lead character is a brazen serial gambler who relishes getting into tight spots and poker-ing her way out of them. Said tight spot in this new book is the supernatural poker game that dolls out invites via miniaturized eldritch horrors and takes places in alternating spooky venues, from slaughterhouses to murder scenes to abandoned churches.
What’s really for sale with this book is a combination of two familiar story constructs — horror and high-stakes gambling. It’s a pretty interesting combo, one I’ve maybe not really seen before, at least not seen tackled so directly. I think it’s the type of story that works well in comics. Plot-wise, it really could have just been a gambling story, but the visuals there wouldn’t have drawn in the audience nearly as well as they do with the spooky touches we get from Arcana Royale.
And that’s what I enjoyed the most here. The artwork in this book is really stunning from the cover on. Zamudio is a great choice for a book like this that demands so many character designs. He delivers a world here that oscillates from realistic dark alleyways to the more supernatural rooms described above. And Crabtree — one of my favorite colorists — elevates every piece of imagery in this book. The art is sharp, interesting, and just perfect for the scripting.
If that sounds up your alley, you’re definitely going to dig this book.
The Prog Report
2000AD 2423 (Rebellion Publishing): The two highlights of this week’s Prog for me where the non-ending ending to the current Fiends of the Western Front: Wilde West story (it’s a massive cliffhanger!) and the Future Shock, Last Chance To See. Fiends has been excellent, one of the highlights of what has so-far been a strong year for 2000AD. It’s written by Ian Edginton, illustrated by Tiernen Trevallion, and lettered by Jim Campbell. This week’s strip serves up an ending, for now, with a twist that made me a bit frustrated we won’t soon get the next chapter. But that’s a good problem to have as it speaks to how strong this comic has been. Last Chance to See, meanwhile, is written by Paul Goodenough, with art by Luke Horsman, and letters by Annie Parkhouse. It’s a rapidfire wrecked-future speed to an end reveal that is just perfect. I thought it was great, the exact type of thing I’m looking for when I read Future Shocks. This week’s cover (above) is by Tiernen Trevallion. As always, you can pick up a digital copy of The Prog here. —Zack Quaintance
Read more entries in the weekly Wednesday Comics reviews series!
Next week, another one of the buzziest books of the young year arrives with Out of Alcatraz #1, plus much more!
English (US) · 