In this week’s Wednesday Comics Reviews, books are either zooming down the track or looking deep into the abyss, with The War #1; I, Tyrant #1; Speed Racer #1; and more! Plus, The Prog Report returns!
The War #1
Writer: Garth Ennis
Artist: Becky Cloonan
Colorist: Tamra Bonvillain
Letterer: Pat Brosseau
Publisher: BOOM! Studios
Review by Sean Dillon
Originally serialized in the pages of Hello, Darkness, The War presents a vision of the present day on the brink of collapse as the Atom Bomb returns to the prominence of doomsday predictions. In many regards, The War is a work more in tune with Garth Ennis’ prior series A Walk Through Hell. There’s an air of melancholic despair to the work in contrast to the expectations one might have of the writer of The Boys: Herogasm or Dicks.
Equally playing out of their typical format is artist Becky Cloonan. While previously working with Ennis on a short for the anthology series Creepshow, Cloonan forgoes the cartoonish excesses of that story in favor of emphasizing the melancholy at the heart of the world of this comic. Even before the atomic bomb is threatened, there’s a sense of despair to the world Cloonan draws. Couples whose love is in decline. Friends who barely know each other.
The War ultimately reveals itself to be the bleakest Ennis has ever written in a career full of bleak works. But Cloonan’s art pushes it above into a modern version of Threads with all the despair and bleakness that implies. It neither shies away from the horrors of atom-nal fallout nor does it fetishize the grotesque nature of a world killing itself. Instead, it presents the world honestly and breaks your heart while doing so. Highly recommended.
Speed Racer #1
Writer: David Pepose
Art: Davide Tinto
Colors: Rex Lokus
Letters: Buddy Beaudoin
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
Review by Clyde Hall
Growing up with racing fever stoked by Al Unser, A.J. Foyt, Don Prudhomme’s Snake, Tom McEwen’s Mongoose, and Hot Wheels cars and tracks, the Speed Racer cartoon was a natural fit in my neighborhood. Kids tuned in for the theme song and stayed for the race sequences wherein James Bond-level automotive gadgetry often won the day for Speed thanks to his powerful Mach 5.
In our modern era of The Fast and the Furious franchise, Ford v Ferrari, and F1, the new Speed Racer miniseries from Mad Cave may also be in the straightaway and leading the pack to a comic book adaptation Winner’s Circle. Writer David Pepose has certainly earned animation adaptation cred with books like Space Ghost and Captain Planet.
But chronicling the ‘demon on wheels’ comes with different challenges than those other ‘toons. Seeing the Mach 5 tear down the track in the classic cartoon quickened juvenile pulses. Love it or revile it, the 2008 Speed Racer live-action movie also delivered cartoon-come-to-life visual spectacle. The original animation of anime pioneer Tatsuo Yoshida contained exciting racing sequences for its time. Does it equate as well when done in a comic book format?
Speed Racer had its start in Yoshida’s manga work, Mach GoGoGo, showing that stories about a young racer climbing his way into world class competition can work in a two dimensional format lacking movement or spectacle. Artist Davide Tinto does his part seconding that motion with a short racing segment near the start of the premiere issue. It’s filled with explosions, cutter blades, and auto-jack jumps. Tinto shows great skill rendering cars, both real and fanciful, as well as the human characters. His strengths illustrating the mechanical and organic components are pleasantly balanced. His prime pit crew of color artist Rex Lokus and letterer Buddy Beaudoin helps sell the physics-bending fun of race time with blurring chromatic speedlines and weapon system labels helpfully inserted.
Meantime, Pepose dives directly into the character-building elements. We get flashbacks with elder Racer brother Rex, idolized by young Speed. Then we follow Speed as he tries embarking on his own racing career despite Pops Racer’s grief over the death of Rex. Pops wants his remaining sons to stay in school and avoid the perils of racing. But Speed, Spritle, and Chim-Chim have other ideas they embark upon covertly. Speed meets an interesting young lady named Trixie, and Pops runs afoul of a bigtime established racing syndicate pressuring him to work up a cutting edge competition engine for them. The issue ends on a literal life-or-death race with looming consequences for our hero.
David Pepose takes liberties with cartoon canon in this opening chapter. Much as he’s done before, he works in the best elements of the source material and adjusts it for an older audience. We not only see the grief Pops has suffered losing his eldest son. Through his other sons we feel it and experience how its impacted every decision regarding their family’s future.
Some of those are money issues, with Pops Racer the innovative entrepreneur struggling against big automotive business interests. Financial woes have driven Speed into less squeaky-clean venues, like extreme street racing. Dangerous yet lucrative. And these difficulties resulted in other familial fractures like Mom Racer and Pops in the midst of a separation.
Spritle’s a bit older than the cartoon little brother and runs a subscription live streaming race feed with his mascot, Chim-Chim the monkey. Not a chimpanzee, a monkey…a puzzling deviation from the original. Despite that, I have to say this updated Spritle works for me. Because back in the day, I wished serious hurt on Spritle. I dunno if it was the voice, or the way he was always stowing away in the Mach 5, or how he endangered poor Chim-Chim with his foolishness. Maybe that combination. But I wanted Spritle turned into trunk goulash from some Fatal Formula death-racer rearending Speed’s ride. Here he adds needed levity that’s more funny, less irritating. He’s also working with Speed not just on promotion, but on keeping their family solvent.
As a starter pistol issue, Speed Racer #1 fires on all cylinders for me. If you’re a fan of the original cartoon’s charm and innocence, you may feel this Mach 1 has engine knocks. Which seems a divisive factor regarding the property if the 2008 film was any indicator. It faithfully carried the spirit of the cartoon into a live-action movie and ended up a box office bomb for its trouble. Now, it’s enjoying resurgence as a cult classic. The Mad Cave Speed Racer team is test driving new approaches while keeping the family themes and racing excitement of the original intact. They’re also releasing a Racer X title soon, so checking out this launch could lead to dual new pulls on your comic book shopping list.
I, Tyrant #1
Writer: ee. zann
Artist: Godfarr
Letterer: Amir Zann
Publisher: Image Comics
Review by Khalid Johnson
The art of Godfarr on this first issue/chapter of i,Tyrant is striking and haunting. The use of blacks, texture and excellent camera movement are on full display on every page, although the jumps in time can occasionally be disorienting until you catch the rhythm of the story. “Haunting” feels like an apt description as our main character, an Iranian playwright named Hafez, unpacks Zaharr, the ancient and bloodthirsty king haunting his current project and making demands for the end of the play. In the midst of this, immigration and the threat of deportation loom as a backdrop.
The writing of e.e. zann is thorough, although also a bit dense, as letterer Amir Zann moves the eye through the page and helps reinforce movement. There are a lot of good lettering decisions while there are the occasional distracting places. The density serves to provide exposition through Hafez in therapy, recounting the history of Zaharr and a bit of his own personal and familial history. It feels like we spend more time with Zaharr, and I would have appreciated more space with Hafez and his interior life, since so much of his interior is consumed by Zaharr.
Taking the horror of being haunted and then blending it into the body as juxtaposition is excellent, and a lot of the ideas at play are working together well. I had to read it over twice to really appreciate what was happening and how things were operating in concert, as well as to really take in what was happening through the pages. This is a first issue to sit down with and take in.
Out of Alcatraz #5
Writer: Christopher Cantwell
Artist/Letterer: Tyler Crook
Publisher: Oni Press
Review by Zack Quaintance
Maybe we’re all trying to escape something. Maybe the world that we occupy makes it so we have to, and maybe we’d do well to give it all up for a chance at doing. That’s part of what I took away from this week’s finale issue, Out of Alcatraz #5, as well as this excellent series as a whole.
Be warned, I may wander through spoiler territory here, so turn back now if you haven’t read the book. In this comic we get the ultimate and inevitable fates of our escaped convicts, the men whose real life disappearance from Alcatraz sparked this book. And it’s done in a clever way that turns on its head one of my long-held assumptions about the book. I’d been thinking this was perhaps a re-writing of history, an argument that the escape — which is somewhat widely believed to have ended in death, as far as I know — took some of the men to freedom.
And I guess to some extent, that was wishful thinking on my part, an almost instinctual desire to see the main characters of the story free. But in the end, the book shows itself to be an exploration of how they lost their bid for freedom and were killed, albeit long past the icy drowning that conventional wisdom might suggest. On its surface, their escape, attempt to flee, and desperate push to reach a long-term plan are entertaining as hell.
There’s unexpected twists, a game of cat-and-mouse, and even a light touch of ghosts. There are compelling characters who sound and look exactly as beaten and desperate as the story demands. It’s a great story of escaped convicts from one of the most interesting prisons ever built.
But it also becomes something much more as the story progresses, ultimately reorienting itself around the authorities who are chasing them. As these issues have come out month-to-month, I’ve taken a journey as a reader that saw me slowly start to identify these characters as the ones really yearning for escape. By the end of the book, they’re not working as police, not really, and they’re certainly not working for the system or the state. They’re a gay couple who want nothing more than to find somewhere quiet to live out their days with the one they love.
To get this, they’re willing to take the arduous road that was set before the convicts, which involves working for I believe five years before being able to truly disappear and live as they want, as free men. It’s in this way that at its core, Out of Alcatraz is asking us a question about the prisons we all live within, about what they cost us, and, perhaps most pressingly, about what we might do to escape them.
In the end, I loved the journey this comic took me on and the questions it managed to raise along the way. I loved the way it had an entertaining cops and robbers chase story as a veneer, atop deeper questions within. And I thought the artwork was just perfect, a great mix of anachronistic, gritty, emotive, and forlorn. We’re just past the halfway point of the year, but I strongly suspect Out of Alcatraz will be one of my favorite comics of 2025.
The Prog Report
2000AD 2443 (Rebellion Publishing): In this week’s Prog we find ourselves in what feels like the deep middle or beginning end game for most of the stories. We get Dredd brutalizing his way to some answers in Judge Dredd: Tunnels, we get demons and gunfights in The Ravilious Pact, and we get a brutal cage match in Azimuth: Abandoned by God. All of these strips are violence heavy, so if you’ve come down with some aggression you need to exercise through reading comics — hey, great week for you. I’m enjoying all three of those strips, but of them, Azimuth by writer Dan Abnett, artist Tazio Bettin, colorist Matt Soffe, and letterer Jim Campbell is the one I look forward to most. I love Bettin’s clean but imaginative linework, and I also really enjoy how malleable the entire concept is. If you’d have told me during the last set of these strips (or, really, even at the start of this one) that we’d have a giant lucha-looking guy doing high stakes battle in a cage, I’d have been surprised but game. And I think that’s what makes me like this strip so much, a sense of unpredictability in a sci-fi world where so much fits. This week’s cover (above) is by Tazio Bettin. As always, you can pick up a digital copy of The Prog here. —Zack Quaintance
Column edited by The Beat’s reviews editor, Zack Quaintance. Read past entries in the weekly Wednesday Comics reviews series!
Stay sharp, because Blink and You’ll Miss It #1 is here, and much more!
