Comics
Monkeybrain Monday Review: “D4VE” #4
Monkeybrain comics don’t specialize in anything save for quality books. “Monkeybrain Monday” showcases some of the digital titles this small publisher has to offer. This week’s entry may not be in print, but the comedy on the page is still very real in “D4VE” #4.
Ryan Ferrier has kicked D4VE’s life square in the nuts. Everything has imploded and the book is infinitely better for it. Together D4VE and his son, 5COTTY kick ass through the city on their way to reconcile with 54LLY and the comedy reaches new heights. This is everything you love about “D4VE” taken to the next level.
WRITTEN BY: Ryan Ferrier
ART BY: Valentin Ramon
PUBLISHER: Monkeybrain Comics
PRICE: $0.99
GET IT HERE: http://www.monkeybraincomics.com/
“D4VE” has always been subversive, continually finding a roundabout way to define it’s core slacker in relation to his ineptitude. That or the disdain felt towards him by everyone else in the story. The question of whether or not any of this was ever warranted seemed to be pretty valid, at least up until now.
D4VE kicks serious ass. Turns out he wasn’t just another empty chipset that seriously needed to defrag, he’s one super processor who’s bark is as bad as his byte. Fuck, I’ll just stop the computer puns now. Anyway, he actually is a force of serious reckoning here. He’s really planned for this day, and he may have been the only robot on the planet to do so. Resulting in a near perfect circle of storytelling. He was never wasting time, he was simply preparing for the inevitable.
Ferrier has gone to great lengths to make the his world as insane as it is fully realized. It’s no surprise that this month, he finally gets a little more playful and action oriented. Frankly, it’s just what the series needed. Valentin Ramon’s big and colorful style dives off the deep end of the insanity and D4VE becomes a cold, killing machine. The playful brutality here will have you in awe, it’s unlike anything the book has put forward before but thanks to the comedic voice remaining in tact, the book doesn’t have a jarring tonal shift. Instead the insanity and gore is treated as a matter of fact.
So “D4VE” delivers a total homerun for its penultimate chapter. Ferrier develops his characters and Ramon evolves his style to show us something we’d never thought we’d see. It plays with the expectations of the story and returns to the roots of the character while setting the stage for a massive finale that is sure to be explosive. I love “D4VE” so much, and I’ll truly be sad to see him go but all signs point to an epic conclusion to this incredible series.
IDW Dark and Paramount recently joined forces to launch limited comic book tales set in the worlds of Smile and A Quiet Place, and we’ve learned today that they’ll continue hanging around in those franchise universes with two brand new limited series tales.
Entertainment Weekly has exclusively revealed this afternoon that IDW Dark’s Any Given Smile debuts in September, while A Quiet Place: Rising Tides arrives in November.
First up, from writer Stephanie Williams and artist Pablo Collar, Any Given Smile puts a football-themed twist on Parker Finn’s successful Smile movie franchise.
The five-part limited series is “set in January 1995, during the American Arena League football championship game in St. Augustine, Florida. The rising superstar of the Sharks, backup quarterback Dupree, is feeling the pressure from his teammates, the fans, and also the city’s gambling underworld, to whom he owes a considerable debt. Meanwhile, a sports journalist investigates a string of suicides that may be connected to the big game. At the very least, they are connected to a sinister entity that preys on the minds of its victims.”
From writer Declan Shalvey and artist Luke Sparrow, A Quiet Place: Rising Tides will also be a five-issue limited story. The comic book tale “brings the creatures to the Florida Keys, where a father-daughter duo attempt to survive on water in a houseboat.”
EW further details, “This tense family reunion coincides with the arrival of the vicious creatures that hunt through sound. Grace and her dad find safety on the open ocean, but she’ll have to make landfall sooner or later; the father’s oxygen tank and their supplies are running low, while a hurricane swiftly approaches.”
Learn more about both comic books over on Entertainment Weekly.
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