Welcome back to PCS’ weekly rundown of the best and worst new releases, courtesy of our friends Adan Jimenez (Adan’s Aztec Musings), Ernie Estrella, Jason Michelitch and Katherine Dacey-Tsuei (Kate no Komento).

PICK: The Escapists HC

It was an inevitable and happy result that Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-Prize Winning novel THE ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY – a story of comics creators in the 1940s – should spawn follow-ups not in prose, but in comics. The Escapist, the escape-artist super-hero created by the titular characters of the novel, came to real-life comics first in an anthology series featuring the character himself. Top-rate writers and artists took turns offering widely varied interpretations on the character, creating what amounted to an odd real-world artifact that might have fallen out of the back of Chabon’s book when you held it a little too loosely in your hand.

While the anthology series was a whole lot of fun, it is the comic series that followed it – the one collected in this hardcover – that is the true sequential art progeny of Chabon’s story. The hardcover comes with an introduction by Chabon himself that, in actuality, is a little “lost chapter” of KAVALIER AND CLAY, featuring Sam Clay meeting none other than a young Brian K Vaughan, who would grow up to be Chabon’s hand-picked writer for THE ESCAPISTS.

The story that follows, drawn in a cartoonish yet weighty style by Phillip Bond and Steve Rolston, features a young nerd named Max who works as an elevator technician, whose strongest link to his long-dead father is their mutual love for Kavalier and Clay’s comic book creations. After his mother dies and leaves him a large insurance payout, Max buys the forgotten, dormant rights to The Escapist and sets out to create new adventures of his favorite hero. A PR stunt brings Max and his friends into conflict with the law and brings the predatory attention of a major publishing corporation. All the while, sequences out of both old Escapist comics and Max’s new ones (drawn respectively by Eduardo Barreto and Jason Alexander) keep the book aesthetically exciting and supply elegant commentary on the main storyline.

The only possible caveat I could think to offer a potential reader is the very real fear that someone who has not read Chabon’s excellent novel will not be able to experience the full range of this book’s quality. But this isn’t a significant worry: the book is perfectly readable and still very good even if you haven’t read the novel. And if you haven’t read the novel, I, in fact, envy you: because you get to go read both THE ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND KLAY and THE ESCAPISTS for the very first time, a pleasure I can no longer look forward to but only look back on fondly.

Shock Value: A+ - Jason

Mighty Avengers #6

For such a crap storyarc, this didn’t actually end all that badly.

Hank Pym miniaturizes Ares into the Microbe of war and sends him into the girl Ultron/Iron Man robot to shut it down. The explanation of the virus coding being too old for Ultron to understand might be nonsense, but at least it sounds plausible, or as plausible as superhero comics usually sound, anyway.

I’m still not digging the little thought bubbles in the middle of sentences thing. Can we just call this experiment failed and move on? Please? Especially as it concerns Ares. Most readers (myself included) already think Bendis has misunderstood the character of Ares pretty badly; I don’t really think there’s any reason to give us a glimpse into his thought processes except to remove all doubt of that Bendis just didn’t so his homework on this guy. “A Thor and a Wolverine” my ass.

How many times are these characters going to be introduced? I understand the desire to make it as easy as possible for new readers to jump on board, but didn’t that ship sail away when you decided the first villain was going to have a backstory as complex as Ultron’s?

But that’s the bad stuff. The good stuff is after the day is saved and Tony comes back to the land of the living (I’m not actually sure he ever left). The look on Tony’s face when the Wasp tells him Ultron turned him into a girl is priceless. I don’t usually like Frank Cho’s men, but he draws a wimpy Tony pretty good.

Compared to the first five issues of this series, this is gold. Just the same, though, thank God it’s over.

Shock Value: D - Adan

Robotika: For A Few Rubles More #1

In a scrubby desert reminiscent of the Monument Valley, two outlaw gangs clash over “tadpoles,” a valuable psychotropic drug. Both want control of the tadpole supply to a nearby town, whose strung-out denizens are now in the drug’s thrall. Enter Cherokee Geisha and Bronski, two cybernetically enhanced blades for hire, who sense trouble when they enter the town’s saloon.

As you might guess from my summary, the spirit of Sergio Leone stalks the pages of Alex Sheikman’s new Robotika series, “For a Few Rubles More.” Sheikman’s barren landscapes, laconic characters, and deliberate pacing may remind some readers of “Once Upon a Time in the West,” even if several plot details owe more of a debt to Philip K. Dick. Alex Chua deserves special mention for helping Sheikman bring an authentic, spaghetti-western feel to his cyberpunk tale with a slightly washed-out palette that evokes the early Clint Eastwood canon. Readers unfamiliar with the Robotika universe should probably look at the first series (or at least do a little websurfing) to familiarize themselves with the principle characters, as Sheikman and script writer David Moran offer no recaps–they simply toss readers into the action. With such gorgeous, imaginative artwork, however, it’s easy to forgive a little narrative confusion in the first pages and simply immerse yourself in this richly detailed, slightly off-kilter universe.

Shock Value: A - Kate

Uzumaki, Vol. 2

As Ken noted in his review of volume one, Uzumaki‘s premise doesn’t sound like something that would yield a lot of screams: the residents of a small town develop an unhealthy obsession with… spirals. (Lock up the cinnamon buns! Hide the slinkies!) But Ito finds increasingly bizarre and lethal ways to insinuate spirals into the lives of Kurozu’s citizens, bumping off townspeople with twisted flair. Volume two offers another generous helping of scary, stomach-churning scenes, but little in the way of major plot developments. Our protagonists, Kirie and Shuichi, function primarily as witnesses to the carnage rather than actors in the drama. This slackening of narrative tension yields something more akin to an anthology of horror shorts than a continuation of earlier chapters. Fans of volume one may wonder why Kirie and Shuichi continue to hang around Kurozu instead of hotwiring a car and skipping town. (I certainly did.) Newcomers, however, can jump into volume two without any knowledge of earlier plot developments and still enjoy the gruesome goings-on, though they, too, may begin to wonder why no tries to escape the spiral menace.

Shock Value: B - Kate