Book Review: Star Wars: Death Troopers

Let's get this out of the way first off, while I am definitely a Star Wars fan, I haven't read anything from the Expanded Universe since reading the Thrawn Trilogy back in High School/College. I always thought the EU was way too bogged down in "cannon" and when I tried picking up one or two of the novels a few months ago, they were darn near impenetrable. Anyway, seeing as how Halloween was coming up, I was in the market for scary things, movies, books, comics, what have you. So when I heard the elevator pitch of "Star Wars with Zombies", I was sold, or rather, whatever the equivalent term is for getting it at the library.

Star Wars: Death Troopers is exactly what you would expect from a mash up of Star Wars and zombie movies. In fact, it is everything you would expect. Take the following factors: a damaged prison ship/bus/space ship, an abandoned island/town/bigger space ship, and the usual motley group of well-meaning and cruel prisoners/guards, throw in zombies and you have the story right there. Hell, you've seen this movie, both on the big screen and probably six or eight times on TV if you enjoy SyFy Saturday original movies (like me!). But though the story is as familiar as any zombie story is, doesn't mean it's bad. It's a well done piece of work, taking the same old tropes and working in familiar settings and characters (whose identities are supposed to be secret since they are not featured on the book cover and don't appear until half-way through) of the Star Wars Universe.

The setting is, the deep-space, imperial prison barge Purge has come up lame somewhere outside of normal shipping lanes, finding an abandoned Star Destroyer, a party is sent aboard to scavenge for parts that may help them get underway. Unfortunately, the away team brings back more than parts. Suddenly it's up to a corrupt guard, a plucky Imperial doctor, two teenage prisoners and a pair of "rogue smugglers"* to get out alive.

the familiar tropes of the zombie genre are trotted out efficiently and done well. though there are a few twists added into the methodology of the zombies, it's nothing Earth-shattering. You get the horror of what is going on and the carnage is certainly not made more family-friendly since this is a Star Wars book. If made into a movie, this would definitely be "R" rated (though there are no boobs or swears, so you never know). At least suspension of disbelief is made easier since you can assume that George Romero movies have not made it out to the Outer Rim, so you don't have to wonder how stupid the characters are not to know to shoot them in the damn head.

It's a solid book, if you want a Star Wars zombie book, you can't go wrong here, but if you want anything more than simply that, you'll have to hope for a sequel.

*Three guesses as to who they are.

Star Wars: Death Troopers
Written by: Joe Schreiber

What I'm Reading: RASL: The Drift

Hey there, I still have on more Vacation Reading post to go up, but, I haven't finished to book yet. Hopefully tomorrow night I'll get through it and get a post up. Anyhoo, this week I picked up RASL: The Drift, the first volume of Bone creator Jeff Smith's new book. A ways back I reviewed the first issue of this book, and though I liked it, I had felt that it was simply not paced for single issue reading, especially considering the book is coming out on a quarterly basis, so when I saw the collection was hitting the shelves today, I was excited.

And I was right to be, though this volume only collects the first three issues, it feels like a much more solid chuck of story, though it is obviously only just the very beginning. Our protagonist is Rasl, a man who has discovered how to jump between parallel Earths and uses this knowledge to steal priceless works of art from other Earths to fence on our own. OVer the course of the volume, he learns that other, more sinister interests have discovered how to do this too, and they're out to get him. We also get some back-story as to how Rasl discovered how to traverse universes and what led him to go from straight-edge scientist to hard drinkin' thief.

As a whole, it's very good and I'm definitely interested to see where this is going. I was wondering how Smith's rather cartoonish art style would match up with the more real-world, violent themes of this new creation, but I should not have worried. It all looks good and nothing seems out of place. It's obvious that Smith came from animation, because his art just moves. There are a couple of foot-chase scenes in the book and you can practically see the characters running in your mind as you go.

My only hesitation about the book is that it is so obviously only the beginning and there's probably a lot more to before we really get into the meat of the story. I want the rest now. But, then again, I'm an impatient ass, so YMMV.

Also, a note about the packaging of the book itself. I had assumed that the book would be would be in the "smaller than a comic, but bigger than manga" size that the re-issues of Smith's Bone have been in, however, it was in an oversized (roughly 10''x13'') format and it added some nice heft to the volume. It also allows Smith's art more room to breathe and it helps the story. It made me very happy that I waited for trade.

Vacation Reading: THE BEST OF THE SPIRIT

The Best of the Spirit is a book I had read several years ago, courtesy of the local library, however it recently came up as a selection of my (Comic)Book Club for this month. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend this month's meeting/drink-up, so I neglected to pick up a copy. Fortunately, the weather on the night in question proved apocalyptic, so I learned on Christmas Eve that it had been pushed back to Jan. 2, so I grabbed a copy and threw it in my suitcase.


This book contains various stories from The Spirit Sunday newspaper supplement from 1941 through 1950 and (I believe) they are all seven pages long. The single fact that they are all so short is shocking considering the amount of information and story they contain. Will Eisner's art is very good and you can see it evolve throughout the book, from the very "puply" style of the first few stories, to a much more cartoonish style towards the end. And some of the title pages are just jaw-dropping, employing techniques that Jim Steranko would use to drop jaws forty years later.

Here are two as examples:




The stories themselves are very good and the wide range of story-telling styles employed (standard comics, text with pictures, story-book-like, etc.) is just incredible when you consider that it was all done by one author. The hardest part about judging the stories is that you have to keep reminding yourself that Eisner is inventing this stuff. It's kind of like when I watched Citizen Kane for the first time a few years ago and I realized that I'd already seen the whole movie in various bits on The Simpsons, it's almost impossible to understand how revolutionary this stuff was, since so many of these things have been woven into the tapestry that is comics today.

One of the best things that Eisner does so well, is that he recognizes that the Spirit himself is one of the least interesting characters in the book, and as you get to the later stories, the Spirit becomes less of a character int he stories and instead is a macguffin or a force of nature that moves the stories forward, sometimes appearing only in a single panel or not at all.

Overall, the box at the top of the title page promises Action, Mystery, Adventure! and this book does deliver. The only mark against this book are the absolutely horrible racial caricatures, particularly of Ebony, the Spirit's cab-driving side-kick. They are indefensible other than to say that they are a product of their time.

As for the recent movie, ever since I saw the first images, I had a feeling that it wasn't for me, coming from "Whores, Whores N' More Whores!" Frank Miller, I had a feeling it would stray from what I've always liked about this character. After reading Doctor K's recent negative review, and Conditional Jeff's thoughtful notes on why he was skipping out on it and I decided that life's too short to waste my time and money on a movie that I know that I'd hate (though I will rent it, since I bizarrely consider Netflix "free"). All I can say, is considering the movie made about $1.25 in it's first weekend, hopefully that means we won't get subjected to Frank Miller's "vision" of Buck Rogers.

Other recommended reading: To see a big-name comics creator do right by the character, definitely check out Darwyn Cooke's first collection of DC's recent re-launch of The Spirit. It contains six, very good done-in-one stories, and Cooke & Jeph Loeb's The Spirit/Batman team-up, which is a hoot.

Vacation Reading: THE RIGHT STUFF

Happy New Year folks! After a fun few days in the sun (and a few more at home in recovery), I've decided to do a quick series about the books I blew through while trying to keep my kids from jumping into the lagoons to "play" with the sharks they had on display.

First up is The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. After catching the last half of the movie on AMC a couple weeks ago I lamented on twitter that I had yet to get off my ass to read the book, one quick recommendation from Kevin Church and a 40% off coupon from Borders later and it was on the top of the pile for my vacation. Being a space geek from earliest childhood, my first ever book report was about a biography of John Glenn, I was very familiar with the story of the Mercury Seven astronauts and the American space program in general, I've also seen the film many, many times. However, the book is a much different animal than the movie, which seemed to be a much more straight forward docu-drama about how the men were chosen and what happened during the years of the program. Wolfe, in his book, seems more interested in getting in their head and finding out, "what makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle ...ad wait for someone to light the fuse?" He also delves into the idea that the Astronauts were not merely meant to be heroes to our nation, but our ultimate heroes during the Cold War, single-combat warriors battling the Russian Cosmonauts for rule over the very space above our heads.

I think he does the first the best, helping us to understand the mind-set of a military pilot and how the best of the best judge themselves against each other. The supreme amount of confidence that a ma must have being a pilot at that time, knowing you had a 20% chance of dieing by simply climbing into an airplane in those days must have been stifling. Yet, Wolfe never makes these men out to be egotistical. They are doing a job that requires them to be this way, and quite simply, it almost makes them, ad their families unable to operate as "normal" society does. In a way, it mirrors what seems to be happening with returning Iraq and Afghan War veterans with PTSD, and I wonder if he looked into those who had "the right stuff" and lost it ever experienced symptoms of PTSD, or if that was a closed subject, both in the 1950's & 60's when these events occurred and even in the late 1970's when this book was written.

Wolfe's second theme of the book, that the Astronaut's were America's proxy single-combat warriors of the skies didn't work so well for me. Probably because, by the time I was a child, the Cold War was still going on and space seemed less like a battle ground than an empty place where ICBM's will pass in the night whist on their way to delivering mutually-assured destruction. Wolfe even goes as far as to declare the Cold War over once the US pushes forward its agenda to go to the moon, despite the War forging ahead for at least two more decades. I understand his point, but the Astronauts proved to be simply warriors in a battle that came in the middle of the war.

All of this is not to say that I did not enjoy the book, the cooperation of many of the Astronauts in the writing of the book is what makes it the most interesting, as a long time space geek, I'm very familiar with the time lines and the general facts of each launch, but the personal recollections ad some of the behind-the-scenes politicking of the missions are very enlightening. Also, it is a very quick, snappy read. I blew through its 351 pages in two days, so I highly recommend it.

Other recommended reading: Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon, is probably my favorite book on the American space program, gaining incredible access to NASA and the twelve men who walked on the moon, this book (at 720 pages) is a solid brick of knowledge, but it's also a very fast read as well.