It’s the general consensus among comics fans these days that Rick Remender is absolutely killing it on his various and sundry creator-owned Image titles, and while his unique combination of four-color personal psychotherapy session/homage to fill-in-the-genre is a bit more hit-or-miss for me as a reader (Deadly Class being the only one that, for my money, never misses) than it is for many , even at their most clunky and heavy-handed titles like Low and Black Science remain thoroughly readable affairs whose earnestness is, at the very least, honest — even when it’s laid on a bit too thick. And he always gets the best artists to work with him, doesn’t he?

The recent wrap-up of Tokyo Ghost (and speaking of the best artists, how about Sean Gordon Murphy’s work on that book?) has left a gap in Remender’s apparently-24/7 production schedule, but fear not : no sooner does…

The recent, tragic resolution to the Jacob Wetterling case here in Minnesota got me thinking back to other, dare I use the term, “famous” missing children stories of years gone by, and when I noticed that Netflix had recently added the 2014 documentary Who Took Johnny (I know, I know — I think the title should have a question mark in it, too, but it doesn’t), which focuses on the 1982 disappearance of then-paperboy Johnny Gosch while on his morning delivery route in West Des Moines, Iowa,  to their streaming queue (which is probably your only way to see it given that it’s not, to my knowledge, available on either Blu-ray or DVD), I decided to give it a go the other night. The idea that anyone would abduct or otherwise harm a child is anathema to most of us, I would hope, and the plight of any missing kid’s…

You know how it goes — you hear reasonably decent things about a film for some time, but for whatever reason, you just never get around to watching it. There’s always something else to see, read, or otherwise pay attention to, and something that you know you really should check out just ends up getting buried further and further down in the old baket of priorities.

Such was the case with me and Apartment 143 (or, as it’s known in its native Spain, Emergo), a Barcelona-filmed “found footage” number from 2011 directed by then-first-timer Carles Torrens and written by Buried director Rodrigo Cortes that’s been available on Netflix (as well as Blu-ray and DVD) for some time. Plenty of folks whose opinions I generally respect have had plenty good to say about it, but it never worked its way to the top of my “must-see” list for whatever reason…

I suppose it was inevitable at some point : having emptied the respective wells of every single “found footage” framing device well past the point most of us would consider to be bone dry,  a couple of enterprising young indie filmmakers — in this case Israeli low-budget would-be auteurs Doron and Yoav Paz (who have upped the ante in the self-branding department by capitalizing their collective “handle” of “The PAZ Brothers”) — have gone and given us the first “mockumentary” horror filmed through a pair of Google Glasses with their 2015 effort Jeruzalem. It’s a clever enough conceit (that will certainly be done to death within a few years) to keep you watching , to be sure — but is what our protagonist is seeing through her prescription-specific toy worth keeping an eye on? I’ll give you the particulars and you can decide for yourself :

Vacationing students Sarah…

Conventional wisdom would have you believe that the word “sucker” is spelled S-U-C-K-E-R, but I’m here to tell you, friends, that simply isn’t the case. “Sucker,” you see, is actually spelled R-Y-A-N.

Honestly, I have no one to blame but myself : when a new foreign “found footage” horror flick — from Ireland, in this case — shows up on Netflix, my instinct compels me to give it a shot even though I know that it’ll probably suck. We all have our unhealthy obsessions, and these sorts of films are mine — which would cause any reasonable person to conclude that I must be a glutton for punishment, I suppose, but in my own defense, once in awhile a Die Prasenz comes along that makes enduring all the Archivo 253s and what have you worth it. Unfortunately, 2015’s Invoked, which I just caught last night (and is also…

Question : you’re a comic book publisher and you’ve got yourself a high-profile “superfan.” What should you do about it?

Answer : if you’re DC, and said fan is Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance fame — who interned at your offices and was planning on pursuing a career as a writer and/or artist on your books before his band went and got famous — you give him not just a series, but an entire fucking line. For developmental guidance you pair him with veteran Vertigo editor Shelly Bond (who has since, sadly, left the building), but by and large you leave him to his own devices and let him come up with whatever it is that he comes up with. The end result? A new imprint semi-mysteriously called DC’s Young Animal. Its first title? A(nother) re-imagined take on the original misfit super-team : the one, the only — 

Truth be told, I almost passed on this one when I saw it on the new release shelves last week. Image Comics first issues are a dime a dozen these days, as anyone can tell you, and while I’m marginally familiar with the work of writer Jim Zub, artist Djibril Morissette Pham is a name that’s entirely new to me. It was the pull quote from former Vertigo head honcho Karen Berger on the back cover of Glitterbomb #1 that convinced me to give it a whirl — after all, if it’s good enough for Ms. Berger, it should be good enough for me, right? Well, I’m glad I took her advice, because this book is considerably more than “good enough.”

Hollywood is always a target ripe for commentary of the seething and hard-hitting variety, vacuous wasteland of the talentless and over-privileged that it is, and Zub’s aim here appears…