Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got five new comics:

And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

”Metal Hurlant: Volume 1” by Various

“Metal Hurlant” was a sci-fi anthology comics published in the early 2000’s. I bought a few of the later issues and I enjoyed them. I always meant to track down the earlier ones but never seemed to. Then I read they were being collected in this hard cover edition so I decided to order it.

Overall it’s like a lot of short story collections. Uneven. Some of the stories are good, some bad, and plenty in between. A few are by guy who went on to be big names, Geoff Johns, Cully Hammer, and Ryan Sook, but most of the creators are unfamiliar to me.

After just having read some very well done 1950s Pre-Code Atlas horror comics these stories were a bit disappointing. They look more modern but they’re actually less sophisticated. Many of the stories are really thin and the storytelling is less than compelling at times. Some drew me in but I found myself thinking, “What was the point of that?” far too often.

I don’t have much else to say about this book because it didn’t do much for me. I remember the later issues I had being better than this but I haven’t read them in a while so I don’t know if they really are. It’s tough to tell a comic story in eight pages and I don’t think some of the creators involved in this book had much experience with eight pagers. The last thing an eight page story needs is decompressed storytelling.

Like I said there was some good stuff in there so if you just have to read a sci-fi comic anthology you will find some stories in here to tickle your fancy. Just don’t expect most of them to.