Steven Grant turns his practiced and studied gaze upon Smoke and Guns and decries it to be "A paper B-movie about cigarette girls in a turf war. The setup - that cigarette girls, a staple of '40s noir that has as good as vanished from the face of the actual earth, have a city divided up into districts and get violent about intrusions from girls of other districts - is so ludicrous it's funny, but once you're past that, the casual psychopathy of the characters and the action are pretty entertaining." Which one could say about most period-piece/sci-fi/futuristic/fetish noir, I should think. Smoke and Guns is the Rorshach Test of graphic novels: people see what they want to see in it.

Sean Fahey over at CHUD.com also hits the end of his stick with the butane perfume from his Zippo and says "I loved Smoke and Guns' in-your-face attitude and the subtle commentary of writer Kirsten Baldock’s hyper-realistic vision of a world where the only smokes for sale are from organized gangs of cigarette girl with guns -- lots and lots of guns."

Jonathan over at Jonathan's Ink has more faith in my Spidey-clone theory than his countryman Rich Johnston does. I feel constrained to point out for my pals in H'wood that my theory was just a little by-product of a strategy session with AiT Creative Exec Josh Richardson, and in no way a result from any inside knowledge or digging around.

Daniel Palacio, performing a damn public service with his blog Gateway Comics, ("Comics reviews for people who don't normally read comics, but should."), reviews Astronauts in Trouble: "Recommended for: fans of the James Bond movies, Armageddon, or any other big, explosive summer blockbusters." Dang, that's some fine company.

...and speaking of fine company, Chris Brown says AiT is one when he answered a question he'd asked himself: "Today I asked myself a question. 'Self, if you only had to pick one and ONLY one monthly comic book to pick up what would you pick up?; Well, I secretly agreed that this doesn't include the bi-monthly True Story Swear to God (by Tom Beland), because that's BI-monthly. I also secretly agreed that I'd still continue to pick up the OGNs from AiT/Planet Lar because they're not a monthly and 9 time out of 10 I get more bang for my buck than a Michael Bay movie."