Comic Book Reviews

Victorian Undead Vol. 1 asks a question nobody knew Arthur Conan Doyle had forgotten to answer: what happens when Sherlock Holmes has to deduce his way through a zombie apocalypse?

Writer Ian Edginton begins with a meteor streaking across London in 1854 and bringing something considerably worse than bad weather. The resulting outbreak is quietly buried by Her Majesty’s government, but decades later the dead begin walking again—and naturally Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson find themselves investigating.

The fun comes from how seriously Edginton treats the ridiculous premise. Holmes approaches reanimated corpses with exactly the same analytical confidence he would bring to a locked-room murder. Zombies aren’t supernatural horrors to him. They’re simply another problem with evidence, causes, and—presumably—a perfectly logical explanation.

Things get even better once Professor Moriarty enters the picture. Because apparently controlling London’s criminal underworld wasn’t ambitious enough.

Davide Fabbri’s artwork gives Victorian London plenty of fog, machinery, laboratories, and suitably unpleasant revenants, while the steampunk additions expand the world without completely overwhelming the Holmes atmosphere.

Victorian Undead could easily have been nothing more than a novelty mash-up, but there’s a surprisingly solid Sherlock Holmes adventure underneath all the rotting flesh.

The game is afoot.

Unfortunately, some of the players are dead.

The Fury of Firestorm #5 turns down the nuclear explosions—well, relatively speaking—and goes straight for Ronnie Raymond’s emotional reactor core.

With the Firestorm Matrix effectively controlling Ronnie’s body, Lorraine Reilly and Professor Martin Stein make a desperate attempt to reach the man still trapped somewhere inside. Meanwhile, Ronnie is lost in memories of his early days with the Justice League, including a battle with Eclipso. It gives Jeff Lemire an opportunity to contrast the bright promise of Ronnie’s superhero past with the considerably darker place he occupies today.

It’s heavy stuff, but Lemire wisely remembers that this is still a Firestorm comic, not group therapy with flaming hair.

Rafael De Latorre’s artwork does much of the emotional lifting. The transitions between Ronnie’s memories and the increasingly desperate battle surrounding him make the issue feel simultaneously nostalgic and unsettling, while Marcelo Maiolo’s colors give the Firestorm sequences exactly the radioactive punch they need.

What I’m enjoying most about this series is its willingness to dig through Firestorm’s history without simply pointing at old comics and shouting, “Remember this?” The past actually matters.

Issue #5 feels like the emotional payoff the series has been building toward—melancholy, occasionally strange, and still wonderfully superheroic.

The Fury of Firestorm #4 gives Lorraine Reilly the spotlight as she finally tracks down Professor Martin Stein — and discovers that the history of Firestorm is considerably messier than anyone knew.

Much of the issue is built around Lorraine confronting Stein about Project Firestorm and his manipulation of Ronnie Raymond. But Jeff Lemire uses that confrontation to explore Lorraine’s own history with Ronnie, framing their relationship around the idea of atomic bonds: opposites attracting, connections forming, and sometimes violently breaking apart. It sounds like the sort of metaphor that could become painfully obvious. Instead, it works remarkably well.

Then Stein drops another bombshell—figuratively, for once—about the larger government program behind Firestorm and several other unusual DC heroes. It’s an intriguing expansion of the mystery, although I’m still deciding how much I want every strange corner of the DC Universe connected by one grand conspiracy. Sometimes a mad scientist can just be a mad scientist.

Rafael De Latorre’s artwork remains one of the series’ greatest strengths. His Silver Age-inspired flashbacks give Ronnie and Lorraine’s past a wonderfully nostalgic glow, while the present-day sequences feel colder and heavier. A particularly clever sequence dives from old-fashioned Ben-Day dots down into molecules themselves, turning the visual language of vintage comics into part of the story.

Issue #4 slows the action without losing momentum. It’s a story about relationships, betrayal, and the uncomfortable realization that Firestorm’s origin may have been engineered in more ways than one.

Turns out splitting the atom may be easier than untangling Firestorm’s family history.

The Fury of Firestorm #3 pulls back another layer of the mystery surrounding Ronnie Raymond—and manages to make the Firestorm origin considerably more disturbing in the process.

While Lorraine Reilly continues searching for Professor Martin Stein, the rogue Firestorm Matrix is busy demonstrating exactly why everyone should be terrified of it. Watching Firestorm casually neutralize members of the Justice League is an impressive reminder that rearranging matter at the molecular level is a ridiculously useful superpower when you stop worrying about being polite.

But the real fireworks come from Jeff Lemire’s revelations about Stein.

The traditional accidental origin of Firestorm gets a darker reinterpretation as we learn Stein deliberately manipulated events surrounding Ronnie and the creation of the Nuclear Man. It’s a potentially controversial change, especially for longtime fans, but Lemire makes it feel connected to the larger mystery rather than simply rewriting history for shock value.

Rafael De Latorre and Marcelo Maiolo again make the past and present feel visually distinct, with the warmer flashbacks contrasting nicely against the frightening spectacle of Firestorm cutting through superheroes in the present.

Issue #3 considerably raises the stakes. Firestorm isn’t simply out of control anymore. He may have been created to become exactly this dangerous.

That’s probably something Professor Stein should have mentioned earlier.

The Fury of Firestorm #2 takes a trip inside Ronnie Raymond’s head—and discovers that becoming a nuclear superhero may have left behind more than a little radioactive emotional debris.

As the increasingly inhuman Firestorm remains a threat in the present, Ronnie digs backward through his own memories, revisiting his childhood, his need for his father’s approval, and eventually his first meeting with Professor Martin Stein. Jeff Lemire uses the familiar Firestorm origin to show why Ronnie and Stein formed such a strong bond long before they became two halves of the Nuclear Man.

That extra character work makes the eventual transformation considerably more unsettling. Firestorm’s origin has always been pretty bizarre when you stop to think about it: two people blasted together into a single superpowered body, with one of them essentially living inside the other’s mind. Lemire simply removes the bright superhero lighting and points out how creepy that actually is.

Rafael De Latorre has a lot of fun shifting between nostalgic superhero imagery and fractured psychological horror, while Marcelo Maiolo’s colors help keep Ronnie’s memories, the Matrix, and the present visually distinct.

Issue #2 slows down the immediate action, but it deepens the mystery considerably. Ronnie remembers how Firestorm was created.

Unfortunately, remembering who is currently driving appears to be the harder part.

Absolute Green Arrow #1 takes one of DC’s most recognizable street-level heroes, removes Oliver Queen from the equation almost immediately, and turns the Emerald Archer mythos into a full-blown urban horror story.

Following Oliver’s murder, someone armed with green arrows has begun hunting corrupt billionaires. The mystery lands in the lap of Dinah Lance, here working as an executive protection specialist and tasked with identifying a killer whose targets are the very sort of people Oliver spent his life railing against.

Writer Pornsak Pichetshote leans hard into the slasher-movie premise without losing Green Arrow’s traditional obsession with wealth, power, and inequality. The result feels less like a superhero mystery with horror elements and more like somebody dropped an archer into Halloween and gave Michael Myers a political philosophy.

That approach works largely because Rafael Albuquerque makes this new Green Arrow genuinely unsettling. His skull-like mask and looming silhouette turn a character normally associated with wisecracks and trick arrows into something people should be genuinely afraid to see standing at the end of an alley. Marcelo Maiolo’s sickly greens and deep shadows push the atmosphere even further.

The biggest surprise is how little this debut feels like a traditional Green Arrow comic while still remaining completely interested in the ideas that have defined Green Arrow for decades.

It’s brutal and stylish. The politics of the book are a little juvenile and it wears it's politics on it's sleeve.

Apparently the Absolute Universe looked at boxing-glove arrows and decided we had been having things far too easy.

Absolute Evil #1 finally pulls back the curtain on the people who really run the Absolute Universe, and—surprise!—they aren’t particularly thrilled about all these superheroes popping up.

Ra’s al Ghul, Veronica Cale, Elenore Thawne, Hector Hammond, and the mysterious Joker have all been pursuing their own agendas, but the sudden appearance of figures like Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman has given them a common problem. Writer Al Ewing turns their uneasy gathering into something closer to a corporate board meeting from Hell, where everyone is immensely powerful, deeply suspicious, and probably already planning how to betray everyone else.

The issue is surprisingly light on traditional superhero action. Instead, Ewing builds tension through conversation, history, and the growing realization that the villains of this universe aren’t simply reacting to the heroes—they helped create the world the heroes are rebelling against.

Giuseppe Camuncoli and Stefano Nesi give the meeting an appropriately ominous atmosphere, while Romulo Fajardo Jr.’s colors reinforce the feeling that something unpleasant is simmering beneath every page.

There are also some terrific surprises, including our first glimpse of an Absolute Green Arrow whose heroic career proves considerably shorter than anyone might have expected.

Absolute Evil #1 expands the larger mythology without feeling like homework for the individual series.

Apparently even supervillains eventually realize the importance of networking.

The Fury of Firestorm #1 wastes no time reminding us just how terrifying Firestorm’s powers would be if the Nuclear Man ever stopped behaving like a superhero.

The sleepy town of Bedford, Colorado, has become Firestorm’s personal laboratory. Buildings are transformed, people are horribly altered, and the entire community is reshaped seemingly on a whim. The government turns to Lorraine Reilly, better known as Firehawk, hoping someone with a personal connection to Ronnie Raymond can figure out what has gone catastrophically wrong.

Jeff Lemire takes one of DC’s more colorful superheroes and nudges him firmly into science-fiction horror. The clever part is that he doesn’t need to invent anything particularly new to make Firestorm frightening. Matter transmutation was always an absurdly powerful ability. We were simply more comfortable with it when Ronnie was turning guns into flowers instead of townspeople into glass.

Rafael De Latorre’s artwork sells that unease beautifully, shifting between the eerie devastation of Bedford and a wonderfully brighter, more traditional vision of Firestorm lurking somewhere inside the Matrix. Marcelo Maiolo’s colors make the contrast even sharper.

As first issues go, this is an excellent hook: familiar enough to feel like Firestorm, strange enough to make you wonder what happened to him, and creepy enough to make you reconsider the wisdom of giving a teenager control over molecular structure.

Maybe Professor Stein should have installed parental controls.