Weekly Comic Features: September 7, 2022

This is not your father's Oogie Boogie. 

Boogeyman #1 (w: Mathieu Salvia, a: Djet) 
​Publisher: Ablaze Publishing

This book absolutely went a direction I wasn't expecting. What started as a seemingly run of the mill boogeyman story with a scared kid and unbelieving parents turns into a dark kid + monster adventure story.  The boogeyman we originally hear about turns out to not only be real, but some sort of elder being known as Father Death. We are thrust into a war between elder entities and lesser entities, a war that didn't seem to turn out well for father Death and his ilk. There's action, murder, mystery and horror. It's a really cool ride.

Ninjettes #1 (w: Fed Van Lente, a: Joseph Cooper)
​Publisher: Dynamite Entertainment

It's like Sucker Punch meets Battle Royale in an art style reminiscent of a gritty Archie story. Ninjettes features 11 young women dropped into the desert in order to fight to the death all because they failed a personality test designed to weed out mass shooters from society. It's an incredibly dark way of handling the issue of gun violence in this country, and yet oddly believable since we seem to want to do everything aside from actually regulating guns and gun violence. This book follows one specific Ninjette who failed her test because she decided to doodle her teacher hanging instead of actually taking it, an action she claims is innocent but honestly makes me more concerned for her than the people that actually took it and failed organically. It's bloody, violent and a little silly, all presented in a moderately pastel art style that gives the whole thing a bit of an arthouse-feel. It definitely walks the line of exploitative, but what do you expect from Dynamite? A fun romp for fans of the "teens fight to the death" genre.