Day: December 26, 2017

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10 excellent comics that flew under the radar in 2017

Enlarge / Super Sons

is actually about Super Pets. And that’s a good thing.

Comic book news this year was dominated by which major characters from DC and Marvel died, which turned evil, and which did one and then the other. Big events are a lot of fun and give us a chance to see iconic characters in new ways, but it’s also worth taking a look at the smaller-but-still-awesome stuff going on in comics. Here are some of the one-shots, the less widely promoted series, and the just-plain-weird comics that you might have missed during the last year.

Image Comics

1. Redlands

Redlands, Florida, is a small town with no shortage of darkness. Whether more of that darkness comes from the coven of witches trying to take control of the community or the conduct of the ordinary citizenry is for you to decide. This horror comic starts out with a siege on the town’s police station that leaves the reader unsure of who is more frightening but with little sympathy for either side. And things get scarier from there. The writing, by Jordie Bellaire, doesn’t give us any easy answers. The art, by Vanessa Del Rey, is reminiscent, with its muddy murk and startling colors, of 30 Days of Night. It gives us the impression that every scene is lit incompletely by flashlight and that anything could jump out of the darkness. You can pick up the floppies—issue five comes out on December 20—or make a note to get the first trade in March.

Marvel Comics

2. Punisher: The Platoon

Punisher: The Platoon is Garth Ennis’ return to the character he made famous. He did this in part by using the Marvel Max imprint to separate the Punisher from most of the rest of the DCU and add the kind of explicit content that anyone living in the Punisher’s world would come across. He also did it by giving Frank Castle a history that included more than just his family getting shot.

An enthusiastic writer of war comics, Ennis used fellow marines, other soldiers, and an author of a book about the Punisher to explore Frank Castle’s military career. In The Platoon, he introduces two new point-of-view characters. While those in his platoon slowly come to view Frank Castle as a hero, General Letrong Giap and the deeply wounded Sister Ly are Viet Cong fighters who have a very different perspective. Unlike the Punisher’s usual opponents, they, as much as the American fighters, are the protagonists. This book isn’t about ideology. It’s about how war is engaging and exhilarating and, at the same time, a wasteful slaughter of good people on both sides. The next issue is out on December 27.

3. Super Sons Annual #1

The title is Super Sons, but it’s actually the Super Pets. No, that’s not true. It’s actually an excuse for writer Peter Tomasi and artist Paul Pelletier to be as silly as they want to be. Pets are going missing, and it’s up to Krypto, Superboy’s dog, and Titus, Robin’s dog, to find them. That means a few pages of action and many pages of Streaky, Detective Chimp, Batcow, and doggy slobber on all of them. It’s on the shelves now. Have fun.

Valiant Comics

4. Secret Weapons

This series deals directly with a running joke. What happens to all the “gifted” superheroes with crap powers? It’s something that mainstream comics ignore (practically speaking, how useless is Wolverine?) and other media treat mostly as comedy. Secret Weapons finds the humor in these kinds of powers but takes them seriously. The series is self-contained enough to read alone, but it takes over where the previous series left off. A scientist had created a “superhero factory,” and while some of the people he created are legitimately powerful, there are a handful of kids who, for example, try to materialize a shotgun but instead make a novelty umbrella or know how to communicate with birds.

Amanda Knee is Livewire, an experienced hero who can take control of machinery, and she sees ways that these novelty acts could become useful. Eric Heisserer, who wrote the screenplay for Arrival, deserves credit for thinking these powers through, but artist Raul Allen and colorer Patricia Martin set a perfect tone. Given the subject, overly shadowed panels would make this comic about endangered teens part of the grim-n-gritty brigade, while caricatures would make it a joke. Crisp lines with vivid-but-not-cartoonish color give it just the right feel. All four issues are out.

Archie Comics

5. Betty and Veronica: Vixens

Archie Comics’ Betty and Veronica get together and form a biker gang. This means plenty of panels of them on motorcycles, hair whipping in the wind, helmets securely in place. It means crop tops and tank tops and partially unzipped tops. It means fist bumps and perfectly lined eyes and Veronica putting a choke hold on a guy stupid enough to harass a group of biker chicks. And it means, when the gang is contemplating going to war with a rival biker gang, Betty reaches into her purse for “protection” and brings out… brass knuckles. It’s a hoot. It blends female solidarity with mad-at-the-world aggression with Archie Comics’ unshakeable wholesomeness. The first issue hit comic shops November 22.

6. Hostage

Guy Delisle’s graphic novel about the kidnapping of Doctors Without Borders administrator Christophe André is light on action scenes and heavy on the kind of mental work it takes to make it through months alone in a room, terrified and bored. The trick is to put us through what André went through without boring us as well. Like André, we have little to keep us occupied. There’s a mattress on the floor. There’s a radiator, to which André is chained. There’s a window that’s boarded up, and there’s a light bulb that doesn’t get turned on. At least we have André.

Drawn & Quarterly

André is hard on himself, hating that he “allows” himself to be controlled by his captors, but DeLisle’s book, based on André’s recollections, leaves the reader admiring him. With nothing to do but turn his situation over in his mind, he comes to remarkable conclusions quickly—in one scene, we see him reason his way through to a conclusion that his captors may well have bungled the attempt to even make contact with a negotiator and that all his time up to that moment was wasted. Soon, though, his need to make sense of things turns in on itself. André has no information, so his questions do nothing but frustrate him. Living through the situation means finding a way to keep it together mentally. And then doing it again and again, day after day, with no end in sight. DeLisle’s book is a tough one, but it will stay with you. Published by Drawn & Quarterly, it’s on the shelves now.

7. Nick Fury

After a look at what real trouble looks like, there’s no shame in diving into pure fantasy. The adventures of Nick Fury Jr., gadget-laden superspy, will give you a sugar rush. A shameless James Bond riff, this has Nick Fury Jr., son of grizzled warhorse Nick Fury, spying it up on the French Riviera. The comic is pure joyful play. The relish that writer James Robinson and artist Alejandro Cal Oliveira bring to the character and the visuals is palpable. Story? I gave you the words “Nick Fury,” “James Bond,” and “French Riviera.” You know the story. On the shelves now.

Dynamite Entertainment

8. Centipede

Every year there’s a comic that is better than it should be. Last year it was The Flintstones. This year it’s Dynamite Entertainment’s Centipede. Yes, the one based on the Atari game. Dale Trell is the last man on Sty-Rek, his planet, and he’s going to go out and murder the monster that killed his world. The funny thing is, he didn’t much like his world. In a twist that might feel a little too on-the-nose for some, Dale liked myths and heroic stories (including Earth memorabilia) in a way that isolated him from the rest of his planet. Dale was in a civilization that would be featured in comic books, but within that civilization he was a comic-book-reading nerd, who is now in a comic-book adventure. The premise begins to loop in on itself, but the theme stays strong. Does isolating yourself by burying your head in an alternate reality or in the past cut you off from the here and now? Or does cultivating a different mindset come in handy? Dale is alive, after all. He has a plan. No one else on his planet can say the same.

First Second

9. Demon: Volume 4

Jason Shiga, the creator of the Demon series, has a degree in mathematics and has found a way to inflict his expertise on both his characters and the rest of the world. His character, Jimmy Yee, is drawn with a childlike reliance on solid colors and basic shapes, hangs himself, shoots himself, slits his wrists, and will not die. Why not? That is the question of volume one, which you can read in its entirety online. The series has just concluded with volume four, which came out in November. Its cover shows Jimmy standing on a mountain of dead bodies and is an appropriate reflection of the book’s contents. The series is a quick read, if you have the stomach to see cute little Jimmy Yee commit the most grotesque acts on both himself and others in an attempt to find the solution to his variation problems.

10. Calexit

If you look at comics this year, you’ll see themes: rage, ridicule, and dystopia. For the most part, the stories enacting these themes have been allegorical. Calexit, from Black Mask Studios, is explicit. Writer Matteo Pizzolo imagines a world in which California secedes from the United States, and the United States goes to war with California. The point-of-view characters are Zora, an immigrant-turned-fugitive-turned-resistance-leader, and Jamil, a smuggler who looks to his own advantage, given that he’s convinced that no one else will. Artist Amancay Nahuelpan makes the world by turns dark, grubby, and garish.

Black Mask Studios

The variations in the art will probably reflect the way in which people see the comic. Some readers will see it as a satire. Others might see it as inspiration. Others as horror. A few will see it as a comedy, albeit an unintentional one. There’s a reason people in theaters break into laughter during horrific action or tragic death scenes. If you don’t share the characters’ perspective, high drama is ridiculous. Depending on your political viewpoint, Calexit might give you goosebumps or a good laugh. The first issue hit the stands in July of 2017. The second will come out in January 2018. Whatever your political affiliation, this is one of the few comics that may end up as a historical document. You might want to check it out.

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Guidemaster: Everything Amazon’s Alexa can do, plus the best skills to enable

If you’ve just introduced one of Amazon’s Echo devices into your home and feel a little lost, you’re not alone. The promises made by Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa are vast, and it’s difficult to know where to start when you want Alexa to do something more than set a cooking timer or tell you tomorrow’s weather forecast.

Aside from Alexa’s basic features programmed by Amazon, there are thousands of Alexa skills to choose from; skills are features made by third-party developers that help Alexa do more than just the Amazon-sanctioned basics, and many of them integrate with other services, apps, and products. Each skill has to be enabled in the Alexa mobile app (or from your account on Amazon.com) before Alexa can use it.

Enabling a skill is almost like installing an app on a mobile device—simply enable a skill you want and Alexa will be able to use that skill until you disable it. There are more than 25,000 Alexa skills now, and while Amazon has improved the interface through which you can search for and discover skills, it’s still not the easiest to work with. Here, we’ve outlined Alexa’s main features and the best third-party Alexa Skills that you can enable now to use with Amazon’s virtual assistant.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Basic Alexa features

General

Alexa is built to tell you even the most mundane information about your day and anything else you want to know about. You can use voice commands to have Alexa tell you the time and date as well as anything that might be on your calendar, provided that you’ve linked a calendar in the Alexa mobile app.

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Israel’s Jesus Trail: 3 Days of Trekking, Eating and Generous Strangers

IT took five minutes into my pilgrimage for somebody to offer me free food. Leaving my inn, a converted 19th-century mansion in the Israeli town of Nazareth, I’d turned the corner to make the initial ascent toward the Franciscan Mensa Church. The church stands on the site where Christ was said to have dined with his apostles just after his resurrection. A smiling man with a lazy eye, standing by the trail head, decided I should dine, too.

He handed me a chocolate bar, gesturing toward the orange trail markers that demarcated…

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Cancer Drug Price Rises 1,400% With No Generic to Challenge It

Since 2013, the price of a 40-year-old, off-patent cancer drug in the U.S. has risen 1,400%, putting the life-extending medicine out of reach for some patients.

Introduced in 1976 to treat brain tumors and Hodgkin lymphoma, lomustine has no generic competition, giving seller NextSource Biotechnology LLC significant pricing power.

The U.S….

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The Foster Care System Is Flooded With Children Of The Opioid Epidemic

Judge Marilyn Moores, who presides over the juvenile court in Marion County, Ind., says the number of children who are in need of foster care because of the opioid epidemic has more than doubled in the past three years.

Matt Sedensky/AP


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Judge Marilyn Moores, who presides over the juvenile court in Marion County, Ind., says the number of children who are in need of foster care because of the opioid epidemic has more than doubled in the past three years.

Matt Sedensky/AP

The U.S. foster care system is overwhelmed, in part because America’s opioid crisis is overwhelming. Thousands of children have had to be taken out of the care of parents or a parent who is addicted.

Indiana is among the states that have seen the largest one-year increase in the number of children who need foster care. Judge Marilyn Moores, who heads the juvenile court in Marion County, which includes Indianapolis, says the health crisis is straining resources in Indiana.

“We’ve gone from having 2,500 children in care, three years ago, to having 5,500 kids in care. It has just exploded our systems,” Moores says.

While laws in all U.S. states require that child welfare agencies make “reasonable efforts” to reunify parents with their children, Moores says that process can be especially traumatic for children whose parents often relapse.

She says that more legal consideration should be paid to the child’s rights and safety and that “right now, that balance does not tip legally in favor of the child.”

Earlier this year, President Trump declared the opioid epidemic a public health emergency. But that designation “didn’t come with money,” Moores says. “And that is sadly what the necessity is.” She says reform is needed, and it should focus on “how much in the way of resources should be devoted to trying to reunify children with parents who cannot conquer their addiction.”

Interview Highlights

On what kind of cases she is seeing

One of the hallmarks is we’re seeing many younger children than we had seen before. I think the average age is about three years younger than we had seen. We see lots and lots of opioid-addicted babies following their releases from NICUs [neonatal intensive care units] where they went through withdrawal from opioid addiction that they suffered in utero. We see kids — little, itty-bitty kids — that are found in car seats in the backs of cars where parents have overdosed in the front seat. And because of the age of the children, we can’t safely leave them with addicted parents. And so, it has just over-rolled our system.

On how her division has been grappling with the influx

Well, we’re scrambling. I’ve had kids that I’ve had to find a foster home for — not in Marion Country, but in Lake County, which is by Chicago. That’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive. How can I reunify parents with a child where they can’t even see their child on a regular basis?

We have kids who are sleeping in the Department of Child Services office because there are no homes for them that can be quickly found. Our public defenders, our DCS case managers, our guardians ad litem, our judicial officers are all overwhelmed. But everyone pulls together to try their very best to ensure child safety.

On whether to prioritize the reunification of child with a parent who is an addict

There’s a lot of debate about that, but the law requires that reasonable effort be made to reunify first. Sadly, in some cases, the law has determined that parents have a due process right to their children. In other words, we treat children like chattel of their parents, like possessions, and these are Supreme Court precedent. I think that many of those precedents were issued at a time when keeping kids with parents, there were extended families who were able to help support and take care of kids, but we don’t have that now. And I wonder if the law isn’t antiquated in that regard.

It’s been incredibly difficult for funding to keep pace with the need and the demand for services. Our director of Department of Child Services just resigned and issued a letter saying that the constraints that the budget was placing on her all but ensured children would die.

On whether President Trump’s designation has had any effect

It didn’t come with money. And that is sadly what the necessity is. That and, we need legal reform. We need reform that literally looks and says, “How much in the way of resources should be devoted to trying to reunify children with parents who cannot conquer their addiction?”

The recidivist rate for opioid addiction is somewhere in the 70 percent. We can’t keep parents sober long enough to reunify their children with them. And even those efforts come at great costs to the taxpayers, and they come at even greater costs for the children because being in this system is a trauma for children and these back-and-forth attempts in trying to reunify them with their parents is scarring these children.

On addicts whose only motivation to get clean is becoming a good parent

I think that we need to make reasonable efforts to try and reunify, but we have to have a better balancing of the child’s right to safety, security, a right to pursue happiness, and honor that child’s life as much as we’re honoring the parents’ right. And right now, that balance does not tip legally in favor of the child.

Tim Peterson, Martha Wexler and Sarah Handel produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Emma Bowman adapted it for the Web.

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Teenager Aims To Improve Breast Cancer Diagnosis In Poor Countries

Abu Qader, 18, came to the U.S. from Afghanistan as a baby. Now a freshman at Cornell University, he has founded a medical technology company with the goal of improving diagnosis of breast cancer in poor countries.

Robert Barker/Cornell University


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Abu Qader, 18, came to the U.S. from Afghanistan as a baby. Now a freshman at Cornell University, he has founded a medical technology company with the goal of improving diagnosis of breast cancer in poor countries.

Robert Barker/Cornell University

After a family trip to Afghanistan when he was 15, Chicagoan Abu Qader decided he wanted to do something to improve the country’s medical care. “I knew and saw people and friends and relatives in Afghanistan whose breast cancer wasn’t diagnosed, and it was fatal,” he said. He further noted that the country’s health care system is weak, with a high prevalence of breast cancer and limited options for care. He decided, “I wanted to build something that would help.”

Now 18, a Cornell University freshman, and co-founder of the medical-technology company GliaLab, he is seeking to fulfill that ambition.

What Qader has built is a computer program that uses artificial intelligence, reams of biomedical data and various algorithms to essentially “read” mammogram images, spotting and diagnosing abnormalities quickly and at low cost — a potential boon to developing countries, where access to doctors and health care can be limited. The technology is still in the testing stage, says Qader.

Qader acknowledges that interpreting mammograms is usually the task of radiologists, but his goal is not to replace human physicians, he says, but to help them — particularly in areas, often in low-income countries like Afghanistan, where trained physicians can be scarce. Qader believes his technology can aid doctors by quickly pinpointing diagnoses to allow for earlier and better care. Although there are mammogram machines in Afghanistan there are not enough skilled doctors to read the results, he says. “They have the hardware — it’s only getting cheaper — but not the manpower.”

“Abu’s project uses machine learning technologies to make computers recognize patterns in the imaging data that have diagnostic value,” explains Mert Sabuncu, assistant professor at Cornell’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, in an email. “He achieves this by showing the algorithms a lot of examples of cases where a diagnosis has been confirmed … I think this direction has a great potential and I’m confident Abu and his team can make an impact.”

He’s not the only one who thinks so. After meeting Qader at Google’s I/O developer conference in May 2017, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and chairman Eric Schmidt sent him Twitter shout-outs.

Qader also presented a TEDxTeen talk in London about his quest to apply machine-learning technology to health care in the developing world: “How I Searched My Way to a Cure.”

Abu Qader, a freshman at Cornell University, has created technology to aid in the diagnoses of breast cancer.

YouTube

Dr. Susan Harvey, director of breast imaging at Johns Hopkins Medicine, says that, “Based on my knowledge of the research, this is very exciting and it sounds like it’s possible.”

But she adds a cautionary note: “Like when NASA said we’re going to get to the moon, it didn’t happen overnight, it took a decade. The same for this, it looks feasible but it won’t happen tomorrow.”

In addition, she says, when trying to introduce such projects in a low-resource country, it’s important to “make sure that the technology can be successfully implemented, that there is a match-up between the resources available and the technologies proposed.”

Even though his project has received a lot of attention, Qader is still a “regular guy,” says his Cornell classmate Ella King, a freshman from Lenox, Massachusetts. “He doesn’t just work and study all the time. Sometimes we like to take a break and take a walk” and engage in conversations that range from the “science-y” to philosophy,” says King.

“He’s pretty much authentic as they come,” says Jess Teutonico, executive director of the We Are Family Foundation, the nonprofit that sponsors the TEDxTeen program. “He’s super-smart, but if you peel back another layer you see the story of his family.”

It’s the story of an immigrant family seeking the American dream and of a kid whose curiosity led him to become a budding entrepreneur. Qader was born in Afghanistan in 1999 and came to Chicago with his parents when he was only a few months old. He grew up surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins, all of them, he says, “trying to figure out” how to make new lives in their new country. A key ingredient, his family taught him, was helping people: “If we were in the position that we could help ourselves, we could help others. That is the philosophy I grew up with and that has always helped me.”

“This is how he is,” says his mother, Roya Qader. He returned from their family trip to Afghanistan asking, “Why people there don’t have the opportunities that he had to study. And what could he do to help people there?”

Helping people has become his guiding principle, he says. In addition to his work on breast cancer diagnosis, he’s part of an engineering project team at Cornell centered on building self-flying airplanes. The project attracted him, he says, “because this can be applied to help people” by dousing forest fires from above, for example, as opposed to sending firefighters into dangerous conflagrations.

Plus, he admits, things that fly have always attracted him — an observation his mother can attest to. “He always had helicopter sets, and all the toys I bought for him he would unscrew them to see what’s inside, how do they work,” she says. “I would ask, how come you broke this apart? And he would say, I just wanted to see how it was made!”

At around the same time — about age 7 — Qader set out to read the first volumes of a Scholastic encyclopedia set. “It was Google before I knew what that was! I thought if I read it all I would know everything,” he says.

His achievements to the contrary, he denies that he’s a genius. “I try to peer into things and figure out how they work and visualize the connections,” he says. That’s how he went about developing the software for his breast cancer diagnosis project. His first step was looking up the phrase “machine learning” online and proceeding to teach himself everything he could about artificial intelligence.

“And,” he says, “I’m still learning.”

Diane Cole writes for many publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The Jewish Week, and is book columnist for The Psychotherapy Networker. She is the author of the memoir After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges. Her website is dianejcole.com.

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