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Advance Review: “Captain America” #16.NOW

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Rick Remender’s “Captain America” has been through a life-changing ordeal. Cast away in Dimension Z for twelve years, he has finally returned to the world as we know it. While away he lost a son and a lover, but he gained an odd ally in Arnim Zola’s daughter Jet Black.

She serves as the focus for this chapter. Remender revels in having this anti-heroine explore the new world around her for the first time. Cap has never looked better thanks to Pascal Alixe’s sharp lines and detailed character work. He draws Jet Black with certain contempt as she analyzes humanity. As she does, Remender’s script toils in her ultimate decision, will she be friend or foe?


WRITTEN BY: Rick Remender
ART BY: Pascal Alixe
PUBLISHER: Marvel
PRICE: $3.99
RELEASE: February 5th, 2014

Jet Black is easily the most alluring element of Remender’s Cap run. She is destined to be a villain but when met by the ideology of helping the weak she’s conflicted. Through her interactions with Cap her ideology has come to reflect on him. There’s this paradoxical and beautiful give and take that sees both characters adopting each other’s traits.

For Jet, the terrible thought of fulfilling her destiny hangs over her head. She is strong willed, convicted, and self-sufficient but lost in a world populated by people who don’t possess such traits. She feels her time isn’t best suited helping the weak, but showing them how to help themselves. She provides an interesting spin on the usual Cap formula.

The overarching conflict begins to “bubble” to the surface. Its still not clear which side of the conflict Jet will find herself on. Remender uses this issue to sow seeds of doubt, and it works magnificently as a reintroduction to his world. The first page brings you up to speed, and the remainder of the issue deals with what is sure to be the core conflict of Remender’s run: the idea of fulfilling your destiny or duty.

Pascal Alixe’s art provides a breath of fresh air. I wasn’t a fan of the JRJR stuff in the first chapters, so I’m happy to report that those looking for a harder edge to their Cap book will find it here. The art is polished and gritty if that makes any sense. Alixe’s art reminds me of an up and coming Jerome Opeña.

There is a smoothness and detail to the character work that makes them incredibly inviting to look at. Jet Black’s physique has never looked more tantalizing. I’d go as far to say that this is the art I’ve been craving on the book since day one.

So the next chapter of Remender’s Cap story begins here. Big threats are coming to tear apart the fractured man. We will see this disillusionment continue to “bubble” in the oncoming issues. A broken Cap and morally grey sidekick will carry one of the best and most original “Captain America” stories ever told into a new age. I want more NOW.

Rating: 3.5/5 Skulls.

Comics

[Review] Graphic Novel ‘Tender’ Is Brilliant Feminist Body Horror That Will Make You Squirm & Scream

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Tender Beth Hetland Graphic Novel

Beth Hetland’s debut graphic novel, ‘Tender,’ is a modern tale of love, validation, and self-destruction by way of brutal body horror with a feminist edge.

“I’ve wanted this more than anything.”

Men so often dominate the body horror subgenre, which makes it so rare and insightful whenever women tackle this space. This makes Beth Hetland’s Tender such a refreshing change of pace. It’s earnest, honest, and impossibly exposed. Tender takes the body horror subgenre and brilliantly and subversively mixes it together with a narrative that’s steeped in the societal expectations that women face on a daily basis, whether it comes to empowerment, family, or sexuality. It single-handedly beats other 2023 and ‘24 feminine horror texts like American Horror Story: Delicate, Sick, Lisa Frankenstein, and Immaculate at their own game.

Hetland’s Tender is American Psycho meets Rosemary’s Baby meets Swallow. It’s also absolutely not for the faint of heart.

Right from the jump, Tender grabs hold of its audience and doesn’t let go. Carolanne’s quest for romantic fulfillment, validation, and a grander purpose is easy to empathize with and an effective framework for this woeful saga. Carolanne’s wounds cut so deep simply because they’re so incredibly commonplace. Everybody wants to feel wanted.

Tender is full of beautiful, gross, expressive artwork that makes the reader squirm in their seat and itch. Hetland’s drawings are simultaneously minimalist and comprehensively layered. They’re  reminiscent of Charles Burns’ Black Hole, in the best way possible. There’s consistently inspired and striking use of spot coloring that elevates Hetland’s story whenever it’s incorporated, invading Tender’s muted world.

Hetland employs effective, economical storytelling that makes clever use of panels and scene construction so that Tender can breeze through exposition and get to the story’s gooey, aching heart. There’s an excellent page that depicts Carolanne’s menial domestic tasks where the repetitive panels grow increasingly smaller to illustrate the formulaic rut that her life has become. It’s magical. Tender is full of creative devices like this that further let the reader into Carolanne’s mind without ever getting clunky or explicit on the matter. The graphic novel is bookended with a simple moment that shifts from sweet to suffocating.

Tender gives the audience a proper sense of who Carolanne is right away. Hetland adeptly defines her protagonist so that readers are immediately on her side, praying that she gets her “happily ever after,” and makes it out of this sick story alive…And then they’re rapidly wishing for the opposite and utterly aghast over this chameleon. There’s also some creative experimentation with non-linear storytelling that gets to the root of Carolanne and continually recontextualizes who she is and what she wants out of life so that the audience is kept on guard.

Tender casually transforms from a picture-perfect rom-com, right down to the visual style, into a haunting horror story. There’s such a natural quality to how Tender presents the melancholy manner in which a relationship — and life — can decay. Once the horror elements hit, they hit hard, like a jackhammer, and don’t relent. It’s hard not to wince and grimace through Tender’s terrifying images. They’re reminiscent of the nightmarish dadaist visuals from The Ring’s cursed videotape, distilled to blunt comic panels that the reader is forced to confront and digest, rather than something that simply flickers through their mind and is gone a moment later. Tender makes its audience marinate in its mania and incubates its horror as if it’s a gestating fetus in their womb.

Tender tells a powerful, emotional, disturbing story, but its secret weapon may be its sublime pacing. Hetland paces Tender in such an exceptional manner, so that it takes its time, sneaks up on the reader, and gets under their skin until they’re dreading where the story will go next. Tender pushes the audience right up to the edge so that they’re practically begging that Carolanne won’t do the things that she does, yet the other shoe always drops in the most devastating manner. Audiences will read Tender with clenched fists that make it a struggle to turn each page, although they won’t be able to stop. Tender isn’t a short story, at more than 160 pages, but readers will want to take their time and relish each page so that this macabre story lasts for as long as possible before it cascades to its tragic conclusion. 

Tender is an accomplished and uncomfortable debut graphic novel from Hetland that reveals a strong, unflinching voice that’s the perfect fit for horror. Tender indulges in heightened flights of fancy and toes the line with the supernatural. However, Tender is so successful at what it does because it’s so grounded in reality and presents a horror story that’s all too common in society. It’s a heartbreaking meditation on loneliness and codependency that’s one of 2024’s must-read horror graphic novels.

‘Tender,’ by Beth Hetland and published by Fantagraphics, is now available.

4 out of 5 skulls

Tender graphic novel review

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