"Homecoming" expands brutal mythology of Southern Bastards

Continuing and expanding the violent nature of Craw County, writer Jason Aaron and illustrator/writer Jason Latour (with additional artwork by Chris Brunner) take their Southern Bastards saga to new levels with the impeccable Homecoming, the third Trade Paperback in the series.  We meet several new characters who leap right off the page and into our imagination of what a Souther Bastard may really be like.

There's Sheriff Hardy, a once-upon-a-time football prodigy whose future was cut short by Coach Boss' cruelty; Esaw Goings is a brutish, vulgar thug, incapable of showing mercy to a common preacher, and practically beating The Holy God out of the poor guy, just to prove how defiant he is of a deity; the vengeful, homicidal nature of the quiet Deacon Boone is perplexing, as he doesn't care about Runnin' Rebs or even football in general at all, and thus comes across as a Godly Saint who's set to clean Craw County of its human trash and corruption; the conflicting nature of Materhead's conscience, another of Boss' thugs, is explored as he begins to doubt his wicked nature and the poor company he keeps when remorse overtakes him following a beating he administered on a young boy who ends up in a hospital; and last but not least, there's the tough-as-nails 'Berta Tubbs, daughter of the now deceased Earl, a woman who just served a tour in Afghanistan, and having recently returned to Crow County, she's looking to turn it into her own personal war zone.

The above mentioned characters are perfect archetypes for the Bible Belt Universe that Aaron and Latour have created, and they each embody an evolving characteristic trait that elevates its raw narrative's complexity to near poetic levels.  Crow County, where dog shit is a reoccurring motif and blood splatters as regularly as Boss BBQ, is as quintessential and unique a setting for grand storytelling as Twain's Mississippi was.  It's just slightly less apologetic.
A

Stripped of the Jedi charm, "Rogue One" struggles with charisma

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, for all its hype and unrealistically monumental expectations, is not quite last year's The Force Awakens.  Its storyline is a sub-chapter, in a way, of the George Lucas created space saga, and it focuses on Rebels who are fighting Darth Vader's evil empire with just as much ferocity and resistance as Obi Wan and Han Solo did way back in 1977.  The only problem is, the legendary Jedi element is absent, and the result is an action extravaganza that feels more wooden than we expected (prequels, anyone?).  Felicity Jones and Diego Luna do their best to embody rogue maverick Jyn Erso and the Rebel Alliance Intelligence Officer, Cassian Andor, but the charisma that Daisey Ridley and John Boyega infused back into the franchise only a year ago is, unfortunately, absent here.  The final act is an overblown and less-than-stellar action spectacle that feels as if it runs about ten minutes too long (the movie could also shave at least fifteen minutes off its running time, and still not lose a narrative beat).  Still, this isn't a bad film, per se: just don't expect it to wow you the way Abrams' 2015 revamp did, and you may just enjoy it as a separate inter-galactic action spectacle - albeit free of the goose-bumps element that we've come to associate with sight and sounds of lightsabers and John Williams' legendary score.
B-

"Rockstars" is a mysteriously captivating charmer

The artwork in Rockstars isn't quite what I expected, but I must admit I was pleasantly surprised.  Artist/illustrator Meghan Hutchison creates a visual world reminiscent of Rock N'Roll imagery infused with the best of Satanic rituals of old, and the result is a debut that inspires a thrilling sense of wonder in the reader.

The protagonist, Jackie Meyer, is some sort of an exorcist or shaman, and he's interested in solving long-since-closed and forgotten mysterious cases of girls who've gone missing after attending a particular rock band's post-concert party.  He's joined in his quest by a blonde reporter, Dorothy Buell, who looks as if she's walked straight out of Rodeo Drive and onto the page of this colorful and hypnotic comic.  Writer Joe Harris imagines a hybrid universe where elements of the darkly supernatural intersperse with the sex, drugs and rock'n roll culture to create something that feels like a depraved episode of A Current Affair meets Moonlighting.   

Rockstars #1 is a fitting debut of a series that promises to scare and intrigue all at the same time, and its characters - along with the evil group of dressed-in-black witches or warlocks or whatever they may be - will, I presume, keep surprising us.  I'm just hoping that Satan himself is eventually revealed to be the biggest Rockstar of all all.  That would be the ultimate spin on the series' title.
A-

"Incarnate" just another run-of-the-mill possession fare

Is there a sub-genre of horror that's been exhausted as much as the possession movie?  Despite the fact that countless movies on the subject of exorcism are made annually, none have, unfortunately, ever topped William Friedkin's 1973 original classic.  In Incarnate, Aaron Eckhart plays Dr. Ember, a unique twenty-first century paraplegic exorcist of sorts, with raggedy long hair that looks as if it hasn't been washed in weeks, who is called to help free an 11-year old boy from a Demon that's completely taken over him.  Of course, it doesn't help that the evil entity in question is the same one that's taken his legs away, in addition to his wife and son, in the not too distant past.  The film is basically a hybrid of Insidious and The Cell, because Dr. Ember's exorcism method involves entering the boy's mind and facing the evil firsthand, like a horror version of Innerspace's protagonist.  Incarnate isn't necessarily as awful as some have claimed; it's simply washed-up horror with nothing left to offer a genre that's already exhausted all possible scares.
C

"Motor Crush" is a kinetic and colorful ride to the photo-finish line

As the punk styled young heroine of Motor Crush, Domino Swift is a girl playing in a very dangerous boys' game.  The series of small silver hoops coiled in each of her ears representing her grit and toughness, she possesses an appearance of a bike-gang leader whose racing talents exceed her gender and physical size.  The world she lives in is dominated by "crush": an engine boosting narcotic that can elevate the users' vehicles to unprecedented speeds, and eventual victories.  It also has a fatal effect on humans who ingest it, making them explode in a pool of splattered guts and blood.

Written by Brendan Fletcher, Cameron Stewart and Babs Tarr, and illustrated by Stewart and Tarr (these creators are more multi-talented in comic-book writing and illustrating elements than most), Motor Crush #1 is a kinetic, colorful intro to a series that races with style, its blood and guts displayed on Dom's sleeve and multi-pierced ears.  The cover art by Stewart is impactful and engaging, with the heroine practically inviting us to watch her race - and beat - bigger and badder boys than herself in deadly contests that are reminiscent of brutality and carnage in the original Ben Hur's chariot race.

Like Dom's one-legged father, whose old school mustache and cut-off shirt sleeves make him appear as a life-long biker, would (most likely) say to her: "Don't go stealing other people's crush and getting yourself killed, kid."  If only she listened to reason and erred on the side of caution, she wouldn't be half as exciting and interesting.
B+

"Light Between Oceans" puts two honest people in midst of a complex dilemma

A lighthouse keeper off the coast of Australia, Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) marries a young, vivacious bride, Isabel (Alicia Vikander), after World War I.  She soon loses two pregnancies due to miscarriage, so naturally when a strange baby washes up in a small boat on their isolated shore, they have a decision to make: report the child to the authorities, or keep mum and claim the baby girl as their own.  Some years later, the biological mother (Rachel Weisz) of the child enters the picture, and Tom is plagued by guilt to the point of confessing to the authorities what they had done, an admission that puts him in jail.  Derek Cianfrance's adaptation of M.L. Stedman's novel is melodramatic and beautiful to look at, but it never quite finds the emotional resonance and impact that its rather melancholy subject matter deserves.  The two leads are beautiful people who apparently have a lot of burden bearing on their souls, but the screenplay never lets them connect with us accordingly.  The final scene, involving two people who've not seen each other in decades, is anti-climactic in and of itself, because it feels forced rather than earned.  The Light Between Oceans is a half-decent movie whose running time is at least twenty minutes too long, and whose drama isn't as grand as the poster and the trailer would have you believe.
C+

"Paper Girls" Vol. 2 continues the plight of our four young heroines

They're finally back.  Erin, MacKenzie, KJ and Tiffany return in this Paper Girls Volume 2 retro 1980s sci-fi throwback tale, set in Midwest Americana (Ohio), and they are so in over their heads that they don't even know "when" they are anymore.  There are large prehistoric birds hovering above, monstrous giant worms fighting one another amidst downtown's buildings, and mysterious characters - a bearded man and a dark haired woman - who know more about this time traveling paradox and alternate dimension that has overtaken the community than we do.

Writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist/illustrator Cliff Chiang stay consistent with the tone and the visual world they created in Volume 1 of this series, and the result is more of the sassy dialogue between the girls, elements of the fantastic and the supernatural, and chapter ending cliffhangers, something that Vaughan is well known for.  His titular heroines find themselves some twenty-eight years in the future, and when they arrive in 2016, they run into the adult version of Erin, an event that confuses and perplexes them as well as us.  There is also an alternate Erin, same age as the original, wearing a strange suit and speaking an alien language no one understands.  The group is unsure whom to trust and how to get to safety, which, according to the new mysterious Erin, is "sixty-eight thousand years from now."

Paper Girls Volume 2 delivers great zingers and pop-culture references (many of the home lawns the girls come across have "Hillary for President" ads embedded in them), warnings written on objects ("Don't trust other Erin!!!") hovering in new portals of time/space, and even a helicopter ride that will place the heroines in an altogether new setting.  The narrative may not be easy to comprehend and at times can perhaps be a little confusing, but it is always fun and never boring.  In today's market of oversaturated and overwritten comics, that is certainly no small feat.
B-