So, Avatar finally was able to get it’s bowels moving enough to drop the final issue of Black Summer (#7).

Frankly, I am not a fan of multiple cover, print every other month and charge three bucks for a comic business, but the sad thing is that Avatar is the only publisher that’s pushing any sort of boundaries right now, except for publishers that don’t touch superheroes at all - and unless you live in San Fran, New York or LA, you simply can’t get hold of non-superhero comics on a reasonable basis. Recently I was getting down on Warren Ellis’ because his books were tending to start strong and slowly wash out over time.

But I was harshing too heavy, primarily because I was jonesing for more decent reads. Black Summer ends like all good scifi is supposed to: a harsh reality with a grim mirror. The first six issues can be read as an us-against-the-world because one of “us” went off on the deep end. Similar to Blade Runner, the end of the Black Summer re-cast the entire tale into something else entirely. Superheroes constantly break laws: they crush buildings, illegal search and seizure, and kill people in the name of JUSTICE.

Black Summer is a serialization of two stories: why would people want to step outside the law to fix the world, and how far would they go? For each character in the book, there’s an origin of sorts - not a “how I got my powers” but “why do I want to be a superhero” origin - a telling of socio-political theory each character has to step in and create justice. Everything between “I want to save the world” to “because it’s there” reasoning is applied to each character. And the ever-unsatisfactory plot of “who watches the watchmen” (in a non-Alan Moore way) is also embodied in a character, slightly ham-handed, but a decent mustache twirling villain none-the-less.

But there’s justice and there’s the law and while the superhero power fantasy is important for young people to feel empowered by their passion and abilities, the law is there for a reason. Black Summer reminds us of why the law exists and why power fantasies should remain fantasies.

*Oh, yeah, in a shameless marketing move, Avatar created Black Summer Zombies cover shown above. **Sigh**

Art shows are always entertaining. Especially the Phoenix Artwalk, which is to say, the digging for semi-precious gems in mountain of used shit-stained underwear. Sturgeon’s law is a total underachiever when it comes to the first friday artwalk. But I wouldn’t be mentioning this if I didn’t stumble on to Alexander Scott Hughes‘ Put a Tiger in Your Tank, which I’ll get to presently.

Honestly, I’m almost ready to shell out some money for some of these works. His work is emotional and he’s got some images that makes him stand out. And a lot of it smells of great potential.

He loves the scary ookie pop culture stuff (Nightmare Before Christmas, Invader Zim) which seems to be real popular with the crowd - it’s probably his bread and butter as an artist. And his work of young boys with bare chests are excellently rendered to my uneducated eyes - and if that phrase sorta creeps you out, I’d say he does a good job of keeping the innocence without making it creepy which is pretty cool actually.

But the gem in my [heathen] eyes is Put a Tiger in Your Tank, depicting the Exxon logo and 50’s slogan Tiger leaping with an Imperial Stormtrooper in the foreground. As I write this, it’s about 10 feet away and it’s got some fun energy with a bizarre pop-culture invade-the-world overtone to it.

Very enjoyable.