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Three Nasty Comics From Avatar On A Wednesday Morning

Avatar Press owns Bleeding Cool. Okay now that's out of the way.

They've got three books out today, Crossed Badlands, Ferals and Dan The Unharmable. All rather harsh on the human condition, often focused on the gorey, the depraved, the sickening. But sometimes for a purpose. Let's have a look.

Crossed Badlands begins a new story by Jamie Delano. The usual trick to these stories is that good people have to become bad people in order to survive, often having to deal with even worse people. Here we start with some pretty bad people in the first place, already fucked up before the Crossed plague hit. And some of them actually enjoying the new world that has been handed to them, and both the challenges and opportunities it promises.

And then a pole of skewered boy scouts, stacked head to arse, obviously, because this is Crossed. And then in the middle of it all, comes… the Bechdel Test in kayaks.

How well do you think this is going to end?

Dan The Unharmable is the wild card here of course. A new book by David Lapham without a handy horror trope to hang on it. Basically it's "What if Hancock was good", and in many ways a super powered version of Sir Digby Chicken Caesar. With a touch of the Frank Gallahers. And possibly an actual, honest to god, realistic view of what would happn if someone got superpowers. They'd just use them to have an easier life. And maybe make a few quid in the bargain. It works. And at no point get trussed up in spandex or leather. Just earn a bob and maybe get laid in the process.

Of course, it all has to go wrong. And get nasty, bloody and just a wee bit "naked abandoned body missing limbs and one breast" on you. No Bechdel here.

And neither does Ferals #5, weirdly, only Crossed gets there. The women have been taken out of the picture, it's only the men, the wolves and the men who are wolves. And just as you think you might be getting a break from the gore and depravity, with a good old fashioned werewolf story, where no one changes form, that doesn't stop the blood from spraying or the intenstines from spilling.

Small town politics, played out with claws, hair and rifles.

After all that, you need something a little clamer, less bloody, less gorey, less stomach sickening. Oh good, there's a new Walking Dead…

Comics courtesy of Orbital Comics, London.

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