Dave's Capsules for February 2026

 

Archive of older reviews

Items of Note (Strongly Recommended or otherwise worthy): Ichi the Witch vol 1

In this installment: Wonder Man (Disney+), Fluff: A Wholesome LitRPG, Action Reporters #1, Wolf's Daughter vol 2, Asadora! vol 9, Ichi the Witch vol 1, Go! Go! Loser Ranger vol 16, Mr. Villain's Day Off vol 7, Shy vol 12, Hilo Presents: the Mighty, Steam.

"Other Media" Capsules:

Things that are comics-related but not necessarily comics (i.e. comics-based movies like Iron Man or Hulk), or that aren't going to be available via comic shops (like comic pack-ins with DVDs) will go in this section when I have any to mention.  They may not be as timely as comic reviews, especially if I decide to review novels that take me a week or two (or ten) to get around to.

Wonder Man: Disney+/Marvel - Okay, I am tired of "actors playing actors in stories about how hard it is to be an actor in this town" stories in general.  Every time the plot went in that direction, I found this series very unpleasant, and I did a lot of muting.  Slattery (the fake "Mandarin" from Iron Man 3) generally made any scene he was in worth leaving unmuted, and the final 15-20 minutes of the last episode were really good...in large part because they were about being a good friend rather than being about success in acting.  Another good thing was the lack of a Special Thanks to Gerard Jones despite his Wonder Man's "unstable powers" arc was likely at least a partial inspiration.  (If you don't know why it's good to leave Jones out, let's just say it was "Jones is garbage"-related and save yourself knowing the details.)  The episode that was basically a world-building side story with Doorman (powers of the Great Lakes Avenger, but that's about all they took) was decent too.  Anyway, if you're cool with actors acting as actors with career problems stories, the rest of this is pretty good.  I just didn't enjoy over half the runtime.  Neutral.  

The bear is a commie.

Fluff: A Wholesome LitRPG 1: Kindle Store - So, a LitRPG is, roughly speaking, a story where at least the protagonist can see their character sheet or is otherwise aware of diegetic game mechanics.  A lot of the isekai I read fall into this category (Great Cleric, Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear, I'm In Love With The Villainess, Reborn as a Vending Machine), and Eddings's Guardians of the Flame books are a prominent early example I am told (I never read 'em).  Unlike the isekais, though, Emily (aka The Boss) is a local and doesn't really think "Hey, I'm in a game," although like most people she wonders why reality has taken on these game-like elements.  I've been following this author's (Ravens Dagger is his pen name) magical girl books (starting with Magical Girl Crystal Genocide) so I get notifications of his other stuff from Amazon, and with Fluff hitting several volumes I decided to give the first one a shot.  One thing in this book that was not present in his magical girl books and got old fast was the running gag that aside from a limited number of purely fictional names, all brand names and location names are the real world ones with the first letter omitted.  So, someone in Anada might drive their Onda Ivic to Im Ortons for coffee (and presumably some Imbits).  I think the home town is purely fictional, since it's Eauclaire (not Eau Claire) somewhere in Anada, and the various L'Eau Clairs and Beauclaires are too tiny and remote (or too "in Florida") to work.  Anyway, on to the actual story.  Once a year, a bunch of people are randomly picked to get superpowers, and their alignment (hero, villain, or in between) is also randomly generated, although it can be altered through taking the right quests (kind of like how City of Heroes/Villains started letting you do that once the Going Rogue expansion hit).  Emily is severely introverted and doesn't want anything to do with any of this, especially since she got tagged Villain!  Her power of "sister summoning" generates minions for her who are sure she wants to be the best villain ever, which isn't helping, given that she lives in a college dorm as a freshman English major (without official roommates, at least, if an ever-growing number of off-the-books roommates).  This turns out to be a portentious year to be chosen by whoever's handing out powers, as the relatively backwater college town has finally attracted the attention of a multinational conspiracy, and I get the feeling that whatever's behind the power-granting picked Emily to be a villain for the protection of the city, even if she has to take it over to save it from the worse villains...the ones who didn't get assigned an alignment but chose to be evil.  But that's a plot for a later volume.  This is pure origin story and setup.  A decent read if you can get past the proper nouns gag.  Recommended.  $3.99 in the Kindle Store.  No rating, other than the claim to be Wholesome.

Expected next month: I'll probably have read the next volume or two of Fluff, not sure I'll review 'em.

Digital Comics:

I will not be reviewing ongoing webcomics in this column, sticking with collections that I'll get in hardcopy form.  eBook novels and streaming TV/movies will go above in Other Media.  This is for full comics read in digital form, either because that's how they come out, or because I tried it out on the LibraryPass app but either didn't care for it or wasn't able to get a hardcopy before the end of the month.  The heyday of ComiXology Originals is long gone, though, so there's not a lot of regular books I get digitally.

 

Action Reporters! #1: WeTeachNYC.org - Another freebie comic from Van Lente and Dunlavey, this one focuses on crusading reporters: Ellie Bly, Ida B. Wells, and Upton Sinclair. The framing device is talking dogs at a dog park, with a newspaper apparently published as a one-dog-operation by one of the regulars.  Even as "kiddie stuff" the framing sequence is pretty weak, but the three historical pieces are good, with just enough to get across to the target audience that Stuff Was Bad And Needed To Be Reported On without getting graphic (and frankly, all three of those reporters had some pretty graphic stuff in the stories this book focuses on).  And hey, it's free, definitely worth the time to read unless you already know a lot about all three reporters.  https://www.weteachnyc.org/resources/resource/action-reporters-1/ is the direct link.

 

Expected next month: Dunno. 

Manga Collections:

Most of these are "tankobon" or collections of work serialized in a weekly or monthly publication, although some were written directly for the collection.  All of them have been translated from Japanese (or maybe Korean, although I don't think I'm reading any manhwa) into English.  Things with a manga aesthetic but done in English originally will go in one of the sections below as appropriate.

Wolf's Daughter vol 2: Seven Seas - I forgot to add this to my spreadsheet after liking vol 1, this actually came out back in November, oops.  We get the white werewolf's name (Kirito) and it's not only not a wolf or moon pun, it might not mean much of anything (as a name it seems to have come from Sword Art Online).  On the other hand, depending on how it's written, kiri could mean mist or fog, an appropriate name for a fluffy white wolf who comes and goes mysteriously.  The two main plot points of this volume are Kirito's backstory (it's not just that white werewolves are kinda weird, he's weird even by their standards) and Tsukino's problems with her parents.  Well, mostly her mother, who seems to be the "I have a plan for my child and they will act it out to the letter" type of parent.  Nice Boy Hayate doesn't want to go against a mother's wishes, but at the same time he still holds the key to so much Tsukino doesn't know about herself.  We get a little bit of listening-at-the-door conversation from Tsukino's parents, and while it leaves open the possibility that they know something about her heritage (if only in the "she's adopted and we don't know her heritage" way), there's no easy resolution this volume.  It'll probably come down to a confrontation in which she wolfs out in front of her parents before running the hell away, or something equally dramatic and irrevocable.  Even Kirito, in his own way, seems more reasonable than Tsukino's parents right now, though, which is not a good look for them.  Recommended.  $13.99/$17.99Cn, rated Teen 13+ (doesn't seem to need it yet, but it might be a "we know where this is going" sort of advance warning rating).

Asadora! vol 9: Viz/Viz Signature - Other than flashbacks and dreams, the kaiju doesn't appear this time.  Instead, the monster is the U.S. government, and how the hunt for Vietnam War deserters impacts Asadora's life.  Additionally, a long-running mundane mystery subplot finally gets and answer, which of course leads to more complications.  Ultimately, this series has never really been about the kaiju, it's been about the lives shaped by both its existence and the need to keep it secret.  The real villain is capit...well, it's the United States, which can't be trusted to not throw nukes at the kaiju, but capitalism is a big part of the government's motivation for keeping things secret too.  They're so worried about bringing more people in on the secret that they continue to rely on a teenager to fly secret missions against the monster, which feels like your basic Power Rangers premise but darker.  (To some extent, this is an Ultraman deconstruction, and not just because Asa's childhood friend has hallucinated turning into an Ultraman homage after taking drugs.  The whole thing is like a shoestring SSSP with purely mundane real world tech and absolutely no UN mandate.)  Lots of plot threads get advancement in this volume, but the only one that gets serious spotlight involves U.S. Army deserters, so a bit of a sideways shift even if the setup has been there from nearly the beginning.  A somewhat unsatisfying read with most of the payoff deferred until later, it feels like a victim of NOT writing for the trade, so we ended up with an arbitrary cutoff that while it had a cliffhanger, it felt like the bad kind of incomplete.  Eh, mostly going on vibes here, it's hard to point at specific structural problems without the objections largely evaporating.  Mildly recommended.  $16.99/$22.99Cn/#13.99UK, rated Older Teen (violence, drug use, implied sexual abuse)

"I call this spell, 'Stab
You With A Knife.'  It's
Super Effective!"

Ichi the Witch vol 1: Viz/Shonen Jump - In a world where only women have magical powers (leaving aside a tiny 0.001% or smaller number of men with some magical ability) and definitely only women are Magika-hunting Witches, feral boy Ichi manages to become a Witch.  Now, in Ostertag's Witch Boy series, the idea of a boy being a Witch in a firmly gendered mystical community is grist for the mill of questions about the binary nature of gender, identity, and so forth.  Ichi...doesn't really worry too much about these questions.  He just knows he can now hunt more impressive and dangerous prey.  This is, at least for now, not a story about deep questions of gender or even really about how society is different in a sort of natural matriarchy (the implication is that most magic-users concentrate in a single city, so the rest of civilization is relatively bog-standard pseudo-medieval fantasy stuff rather than every place being run by mages).  No, this is a story about Ichi making people deeply uncomfortable for reasons unrelated to his gender, and it's very sarcastic along the way.  Will it ever take the gender issues seriously?  I dunno.  But I really enjoyed reading this volume anyway, and I laughed too much to NOT give it a "strongly recommended" rating.  $11.99/$15.99Cn/#8.99UK, rated Teen (fantasy violence, a little light innuendo and cheesecake/beefcake).

Go! Go! Loser Ranger! vol 16: Kodansha - So, you thought the series was done with Big World-Upending Revelations, did you?  Wrong!  This volume is mostly a single really bad day for Fighter D, as he stumbles into the middle of a setup that wasn't even aimed at him in particular, he just got punished for trying to do the right thing (well, trying to buff the polish on his cover identity as a Ranger).  He spends most of the volume as a chew toy contested by the Rangers and the Neo-Rangers, the former of which has pressed some newly promoted people into service before it was strictly a good idea (although it is entirely possible that the thing that goes wrong as a result was part of the plan).  All this, and existential angst!  In some ways, this volume is a bigger deal than the final fight against Deathmecia, because while that did reveal a few important secrets, the basic structure of "how things work" remained intact, just the Rangers were scummy in one or two new ways we hadn't yet seen.  This is qualitatively different scumminess, and those who want to destroy the Ranger Force now have a much more valid reason than "they're glory hound jerks who fake a weekly fight against captive monsters in order to move merch" (which was the good-enough reason all the way back at the start).  On the other hand, as damning as the new info is, the fight does feel a little padded in places, especially in the wake of the multi-volume "three-way battle" arc.  Recommended.  $10.99/$14.99Cn, rated Older Teen 16+ (lots of "but they get better, sort of" dismemberment, some blood, existential horror here and there).

Mr. Villain's Day Off vol 7: Square Enix Manga - The front part is mostly about the Evil League, the back part mostly about the Rangers, in this cozy deconstruction of Power Rangers/Super Sentai.  We saw in previous volumes that this fight has gone on for years, if not generations, and everyone's just sort of getting tired.  At least one whole Ranger team has died along the way, and if the Evil League hasn't had the same level of turnover, they're all running into burnout in various ways (the General's particular methods for coping being the core storyline, of course).  And yet, there's no real indication that despite the non-antagonistic relationship growing between the Red Ranger and the General, that they're particularly close to finding a peaceful solution.  The new generation of Rangers is too uncertain about their roles to think of pushing for something new, and the Evil League is just in a rut.  And, of course, this series has such light continuity that something like ending the invasion would require a massive reworking of how the stories are written...so don't expect major changes any time soon, unless they decide to wrap things up and end the series on a happy note.  Recommended.  $14.99/$19.99Cn, rated Teen (fantasy violence)

Shy vol 12: Yen Press - Kinda cheating in terms of putting this one here and rather in the Digital Comics section..  It wasn't in stock in my local B&N so I ordered it online and will have a physical copy in March, but this is one of the series that shows up on LibraryPass, so I read it there in time to keep it in the February reviews.  :)  The first chunk of the volume focuses on Kehehe, one of the villains, and attempts to rehabilitate her.  Long term, the success or failure of that attempt is unclear, but the story follows her to the villains' secret island HQ and the enactment of the latest Big Plan.  However, the rest of the volume, including the milestone chapter 100, finally goes back and reveals Shy's origin as a hero, as well as showing more about her sister, the deceased hero Shine.  While there's some fighting this volume (mostly trying to protect Kehehe from being taken back to Villain Island), this is mostly about interpersonal relationships and motivations and the like, which as I've said in the past is where Miki does better.  There's a few bits that feel retconny, but in a world where the heart's desire can shape reality, diegetic retcons are certainly a thing that can happen.  The heart wants what the heart wants.  Interestingly, the choice of what to translate and what to not translate let a particular bit of foreshadowing go more under the radar than it might have originally (although the payoff was within the same volume, so it wasn't stringing anglophones along).  Recommended.  $13.00/$17.00Cn, Rated Teen LV (and still not seeing any salty language).  Content warning: depiction and discussion of child emotional abuse.

Expected next month: Chainsaw Man vol 20, Infini-T Force vol 6, I'm In Love With The Villainess vol 10, Tank Chair vol 7, After God vol 9, Kaiju No. 8 vol 15, Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc vol 12.  Relatively heavy manga month even if nothing new pops up.

Other Trades:

Trade paperbacks, collections, graphic novels, whatever. If it's bigger than a "floppy" but not Manga, it goes here.  

Hilo Presents: the Mighty: Random House/RH Graphic - A pause on the main storyline while Winick works on expanding the world of Hilo.  Enough weirdness has been going on that it makes sense for there to be powered individuals other than Hilo's circle of friends (and the entire planet has had its timeline messed with a few times, providing yet another reason for stuff to crop up).  There's a brief "what fourth wall?" framing sequence that has the Hilo cast reading this book, otherwise they don't appear and aren't referred to, the story doesn't depend on being on the same world.  The protagonist is a young girl (same age range as the Hilo humans) who inherits a magical power to both sense when Bad Things are about to happen, and turn into a big furry creature capable of dealing with said Bad Things (but also freaking everyone out).  Fairly standard "hereditary defender" origin story with the usual Winick wackiness, although there's a good plot twist when she realizes who should've gotten the power instead and feels guilt about it for a scene.  A superhero with much lower stakes, more of a Spider-Man to Hilo's Superman, but the world certainly has room for such heroes.  Recommended.  $14.99/$19.99Cn, all ages.

Pants are oppression!

Steam: Simon & Schuster/Margaret K. McElderry Books - Shaenon Garrity writes, Emily Holden draws.  From the cover, it looks like a light coffeeshop comedy/romance, but since this is Shaenon, there's also Mad Science.  (It's not in the Narbonicverse, as far as I can tell, though.)  Ruby is a "hypercognitive transhuman" genetically engineered to be a superhuman problem-solver, who has escaped her laboratory home in the basement of a university and gotten a job working at a coffee shop.  She's out of the box, but still thinking, and wants to find ways to make people happy...which of course end up being romance-related due to the whole "coffeeshop AU" trope.  Garrity works with a structure in the general neighborhood of the Shakespearean five-act comedy, so of course around the middle of the book things go extremely wrong as the pavingstones of good intentions leaves everyone on hell's doorstep.  The back half is about helping Ruby save herself both emotionally and physically, and if everyone's not actually all married by the end of act 5 like in Shakespeare, they're at least dating.  So much dating.  Recommended.  $14.99/$20.99Cn, ages 14 and up (romance, slavery metaphors, anti-pants crusades, LGBTQ+ stuff).

Expected next month: Nothing on my list, but as always I'll keep an eye out.  Punderworld vol 2 was pushed back all the way to May.

Floppies:

No, I don't have any particular disdain for the monthlies, but they are floppy, yes? (And not all of them come out monthly, or on a regular schedule in general, so I can't just call this section "Monthlies" or even "Periodicals" as that implies a regular period.)

While I did have enough built up for a shipment by mid-month, something happened to delay it.  So, definitely a dozen or so floppies next month.

Expected next time: At least Fantastic Four #7 (and maybe #8), Gatchaman #15, Gatchaman: Jinpei, Marvel Knights: World to Come #5 (of 6), Marc Spector: Moon Knight #1, Peter Cannon Thunderbolt #3, Sonja Reborn #5 (of 6), Star Trek Lower Decks #15-16, Thundarr the Barbarian #1, Vampirella #9-10, the Fall of Ultraman #1 (of 6, I think).

Dvandom, aka Dave Van Domelen, is an Associate Professor of Physical Science at Amarillo College, maintainer of one of the two longest-running Transformers fansites in existence (Ben Yee insists I was first, I'm not so sure), slowly recovering from that heart attack, is an occasional science advisor in fiction, and part of the development team for the upcoming City of Titans MMO.

 

"But being dead tired has become like a hobby of mine." - Rooney, Mr. Villain's Day Off vol 7.  Mood.