My Brain Hurts, Novelty Song, Calypso, and Captain America: This Week in Comics #14

This week Captain America: Road to War #1 features a reprinting of the classic Marvel comic Tales of Suspense #58. The comic, written by Stan Lee and illustrated by Don Heck, was originally published back in October 1964. While it’s wonderful to see this classic comic (which pits Iron Man against Captain America in a fun and twisty slug-fest), it’s strange that they chose to publish it in the back of this brand new Cap comic. Sure, they’re pitching a “Captain vs. Iron” storyline to lead into Captain America: Civil War, but as mentioned in detail below, this week’s new Captain America comic is very weak, and the 52-year-old comic used to pad out its length only serves to illustrate the point. It’s easy to think of “older” comics as being cotton-candy, goody-two-shoes, and without modern drama, but sometimes those comics shine because they actually told stories—a concept many modern comics, while in the throes of major arcs, often forget. Also featured this week: a comic about the hardships of growing up LGBT, a comic about music thieves, and a comic about a WWII soldier trapped in an idyllic farmhouse.

Created by Liz Baillie.

Originally published back in 2009, My Brain Hurts Vol. 2 is now available as a digital comic on Comixology. The story, which sprawls to tell the story of several young, LGBT New York teenagers, is deeply impactful and heart-wrenching. Because of the realistic troubles these young characters face there are trigger warnings in this comic, especially for people who’ve dealt with abuse via homophobia. But Liz Baillie is an eternal optimist, and this comic serves simultaneously as a love letter and a middle finger to the hard times of growing up gay around 2001 in NYC. With over 100 pages of content, including “Where Are They Now” character roundups, My Brain Hurts Vol. 2 is an amazing deal, and a powerful work of art.

Created by Brian Daly.

Novelty Song has a hell of a premise. If you take a song that’s already been written, and throw it into the knothole of a tree, that song will magically become yours… you’ll own it forever. That’s the jumping off point of this wild comic, which follows the band Jenny Jump as they try to make it big with a ton of stolen music. But a tree cult that’s poked out their eardrums gets involved, and people realize they can steal any concept by putting it into a tree knothole, and then things just get… weird. Novelty Song is a fast, high-flying, well-illustrated indie that will appeal to garageband impresarios and plagiarists.

Written by Russell Lissau, illustrated and lettered by Marvin Mann.

Calypso tells the story of an injured US soldier during WWII who’s brought into a French cottage and nursed to health by a woman named Calypso. While there, he puts off returning to the war, and finds that all is not as it seems in his idyllic sanctuary. While the story is a bit basic, and even wades into a sort of “woman as evil witch” territory that makes this reviewer uncomfortable, Marvin Mann’s illustrations are worth bringing to attention here. Lazy and hazy, he depicts in this short tale a sort of idealized country home that makes one want to settle down and raise chickens. An interesting read, but maybe too socially old-fashioned for the discerning reader.

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