Xena: Warrior Princess Road Warrior written by Vita Ayala with art by Olympia Sweetman, and cover art by David Mack, is exactly the balm we need today for our battered hearts.

From the very first page, in which the opening sequence of the television series is lovingly drawn out, prompting every reader to hear the pipes, then brass of the musical theme, all the way through the final page and the ending we always wanted, this book was a delight.

The story is exactly the right level of cheesy, lighthearted blasphemy against the Olympians that made the show so fun. Xena and Gabrielle find themselves in the unenviable position of assisting Discord (Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!) to clear her name and regain her godhead and her position on Olympus. To do that, Eris, Xena and Gabrielle travel the world and stomp all over other, non-Greek mythologies, until they can pin the problem on Discord’s sibling Strife.

My favorite chapter lands the three at the door of the crone known as Baba Yaga. For this section, the stories relies on a theory I myself subscribe to – that gods have only as much power as they are given by belief. With Gabrielle’s bardic skills and a little timely help, Baba Yaga is restored to her rightful place.

Xena and Gabrielle are shown throughout the series as the lovers we all knew they were. Phew ! What a relief. And it’s about time, too. It’s 2020, I think we can stop pretending they were roommates, can’t we? I joke, but Ayala’s Xena and Gabrielle have exact the same level of teasing friendship that we saw in the show…with the intimacy we never got. It’s…perfect. We never needed a sex scene, but we did need this.

The art in this book is not at all to my taste, not with so many years of looking at manga art, but when Eris showed up in her angry goth black leather lingerie I had to cheer – Sweetman nailed the look of the series from the gormless villagers to Olympian ridiculousness. In my head I heard Kevin Smith and Alexandra Tydings as clearly as if they were standing there reading Ares and Aphrodite’s lines…and of course read the entire thing hearing Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor in the lead roles. So, who was Eris in my head…good question. I think I heard her voiced by AJ Michalka. Eris was petulant and ironic – of course the goddess of chaos and discord hates to be inconvenienced. ^_^ I was glad that the story included Eris, but wasn’t just another iteration of the original snub.

From beginning to end, Road Warrior is the Xena Warrior Princess episode we all deserve.

Ratings:

Art – 6 YMMV, proportions are all over the place
Story – 10
Character – 10 Other Gods for the win
Service – 1? 2? Not all that much, honestly, very TV show esque
Lesbian – 10

Overall – 10

Bonus features: No Joxer, Eris ends up with a pet capybara.
No Joxer.

It’s the tail end of the 2019 Samhain season, so, in order for you to understand Dead Beats, I want to tell you a story. ^_^

When I was 8 or so, I had a baby sitter. She was an adult woman who had a kid of her own who was about my age (but who went to a different school. We had 5 elementary schools in the area I grew up, we all went to the same one middle school, then were split back up into two high schools.) Melissa – I have no idea why I remember her name, was a goth-y kid at 11. She seemed very old to me, but she liked comic books so I’d hang with her when she was home and read her comics, which were all horror. I didn’t like horror comics – they weren’t scary, so much as kind of gross and all ironic. You know what I mean, right? The person who always stole lunch from the kids was tortured by being force-fed, that kind of morality play. Terrible people getting their comeuppance. They were so tiresome and full of allegory , l which I didn’t like even back in elementary school. When Tales of the Crypt got on HBO, I was like, “Hard pass – I already read that and thought it blecch.”

So me and horror have a rocky relationship. I hate “Boo!” type scare tactics, and morality plays and guro. What’s left you may wonder. And in response, I will sigh and reply “All the well-written, funny, intelligent, creepy horror of the universe, duh~~!”

Dead Beats horror comic anthology is funny, intelligent, creepy short horror comics that completely lack the morality that made horror comics so tiresome. It’s still has some irony, but that’s to be expected.*

The premise is a visit to a cursed music shop, where the proprietor points out random items, implies horrible fates and leads us to rooms where unspoken-of unspeakable horrors occur. We then get a short horror comic – something rather funny, occasionally touching and frequently gruesome – centered around something musical-ish; an instrument, the music itself, whatever.

It was terrific. A lot of fun to read. From the ridiculous “The Cursed Saxophone of Skasferatu” to “Apolcalypse Demo, which married a bit of the end of the world to a final jam.  There’s a lot of musical demonic invocation, which I always seem to like for some reason…

Overall, I haven’t had this much fun watching people die in a long time.  ^_^

There’s no way to comment on art or storytelling as a whole, most stories credit three to four people on a contribution, so you’re looking a variety of writing and art and letter and coloring, all so different, you can’t really compare. But if I had to pick one story as a favorite, it’d be the ghost story written by Vita Ayala, art and coloring by Raymond Salvador and lettering by Micah Myers, “Let’s Stay Together.” When you read it, you will understand why instantly. ^_^

Dead Beats is also pleasantly – which is to say,  very – diverse. It looks like the actual world I inhabit, with straight and queers folks and people of differing body types and colors and ability and yes, levels of demonic possession. This collection has a number of queer stories, from the self-affirming to the openly murderous.

No fooling,  this variety made the book a lot easier to read for me. I don’t encounter Japanese schoolgirls nearly as often as, oh, just about anything else, which is not – for obvious reasons – reflected in my comics reading.  It’s nice to see comic pages that look like the life I live, full of all sorts of people. People who are either killing or being killed, true, but I’m not going to lie and tell you that real life doesn’t have plenty of that, too.

Creators are likewise a magnificent palette of colors and identities. There are so many top-notch creators here, you should get this book just for the who’s who in the credits. ^_^ Which, it turns, out, you can’t just now, because the book has sold out. Hopefully they’ll get this back in stock sooner, rather than later, and you can get your fill of people being possessed, mangled, devoured, rendered and cursed!

Ratings:

Overall – 9

This was perfect Sahmain season reading.

*Use ironic endings the way you would a monkey’s paw. Sparingly and expect things to go badly.