So was anybody figuring June 2012 was ripe for a Mars Attacks revival?
First off, last week's Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred #5 (Kane/Hine) was a Mars Attacks homage. Every page is done as a trading card, a single image with a title and a narrative of a sentence or three.
And then this week came a new actual licensed Mars Attacks series, by Layman and McCrea.
On the whole the Bulletproof Coffin issue was better, because Bulletproof Coffin is fucking amazing, but the actual Mars Attacks issue was pretty great too.
Bulletproof Coffin was mainly memorable for its insane violence. It's about zombies in Vietnam and it is graphic and legitimately disquieting. "Graphic and legitimately disquieting" is a pretty good description of most of the series, really.
The Official Mars Attacks book was less memorable. It's perfectly serviceable; Layman is the perfect guy for this story and, while I'm not familiar with McCrea, his art is totally appropriate. More, it does a good job of telling a self-contained story while setting up a complete arc, which unfortunately is not a common skill in modern comics.
And, most appropriately, it's violent (not Bulletproof Coffin violent but violent) and it gets us to root for the Martians. There are essentially two redeeming characters in the whole story -- General Zar the Martian, and Burtie the Hillbilly. And it's not really much of a spoiler to tell you that Burtie doesn't survive the issue.
The non-Zar Martians are pretty much indistinguishable, while the non-Burtie humans are all reprehensible. Zar is immediately taken advantage of and abused, and he's clearly the protagonist of the story. Layman and McCrea do an effortless job of getting you to root for the "kill all humans" guys.
Anyhow. Both interesting books. I'm sure I'll be picking up BC:D #6, and I expect I'll pick up Mars Attacks #2 too.