In case Mark Millar didn’t already have a tight grip on the nexus of Hollywood and comics, his new five issue miniseries MPH is already getting its own movie – (and just one week after Fox bought the rights to Millar and Leinil Francis Yu’s Superior). Unfortunately this new series from the mastermind of Kick Ass elicits but a shrug.
With issue 5 of Joshua Williamson’s Nailbiter, we dig deeper into the dark mysteries within Buckaroo, Oregon – adding more pieces of the puzzle and raising more far more questions than I fear Williamson can answer with satisfying results. Only time will tell, and we can only hope for the best, but with powerful imagery and a strong, unpredictable story, Nailbiter continues strong: The result is a challenging psychological thriller within a gripping crime procedural.
Southern Bastards #4 Story by: Jason Aaron Art by: Jason Latour Cover by: Jason Latour Jason Aaron and Jason Latour began working together four years ago when Latour teamed up with Aaron to illustrate an issue of the critically acclaimed Vertigo series Scalped, and they would later collaborate on various Wolverine projects for Marvel, sharing …
Modern noir masterminds Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips begin their five-year deal with Image with the release of the first issue of The Fade Out, a sprawling saga of corruption and redemption set against a gritty West Coast backdrop. As the premiere storytellers of crime/noir comics, Fade Out actually marks their first trip into Hollywoodland, the never-innocent city of illusions. The Fade Out sees them return to the familiar conventions of ‘classic’ crime noir, and weaves a tangled web through the underbelly of a 1940’s film industry.
I like this comic book less and less the more that I read it. With each issue, Genius scales back in quality and entertainment. Part of that is due to the current political backdrop in the United States,and how the comic tries to comment on a current events, but fails. More importantly, this critic is just having trouble believing in the story since the motivations within feel thin.
Trees #4 Written by Warren Ellis Art by Jason Howard Published by Image Comics Finally, the plot has gotten a bit of a nudge in this issue. It’s still not going anywhere quickly, and there are only hints of action yet to come that are foreshadowed here. Finding reasons to keep reading this series is …
Red City #3 Written by Daniel Corey Art by Anthony Diecidue Published by Image Comics This series is on the verge of being over. The “To Be Concluded” at the end is certainly ominous, especially considering that the mystery has heated up almost to a boiling point. I’m sad to see it go because I’ve …
War against the LAPD has begun. At this point in the series, there’s a bit of a credibility gap in the story, as we only poorly understand the motivations for the gangbangers as well as for Destiny. This could be fixed with a few issues explaining some context and backstory, but as it stands, the action thus far is pretty hard to buy into.
Tech Jacket continues its quirky brand of storytelling, switching between Tech Jacket’s cosmic activities and his father’s somewhat-normal paternal struggles. This is neither a bad issue nor an outstanding issue. It’s one of those whose strength will be determined by its subsequent installments, so at the moment we’re just along for the ride.
Man, people in this comic really went apeshit when everything went to hell. I get that living outside of a quarantine zone would be awful, but all of these raiders decided that they might as well stick pins in their faces and embrace how ugly the world is. This is an ugly issue, showcasing how ugly the world is, and it doesn’t pull any punches in its “Good God, what am I reading?” moments.
Genius is, at its core, a tale of revenge. A lot of kids grow up around a militarized, hostile police force and get lost in the system, and many of those kids grow up angry and potentially violent. This comic wants to show what would happen if one of those kids happened to be on an intellectual par with Hannibal or Alexander the Great.
In his Eisner winning graphic novel It’s a Bird, Steven T Seagle wrote about how he had trouble coming up with a Superman story that meant something to him while also coming to terms with his father’s Huntington’s Disease. Imperial #1 has a similar theme of “coming to terms”, but places it squarely in the superhero genre. In the opening pages, not the sharpest knife in the drawer Mark McDonnell finds out that his dead father was the superhero Imperial that he read about in comic books. But Seagle eschews the overseriousness of recent superhero origin stories and retellings (*cough
Finch and Crane go digging for answers, and what they find isn’t pretty. This is sort of an in-between issue in which we as readers learn a few answers, but so many more questions are raised that we are still sitting in limbo. Time to just kick back and enjoy the ride, because even when it’s slow, this comic is good.
Low, the new high concept series from Rick Remender & Greg Tocchini (who previously worked together on Marvel’s Uncanny X-Force), creates a world in which the sun, in the throes of going nova, has forced humanity deep into the seas to escape the increased radiation, where they await the results of probes sent out into space to locate habitable worlds (we’re meant to assume this is all taking place on Earth, and an authors note from Remender in the back of the issue suggests as much, but it’s interesting to note that this is never made explicit in the story itself, and there’s nothing that says this couldn’t all be taking place on some alien planet). As the first issue opens, thousands of years have passed with no response from the probes, and the underwater cities have dwindled to just a few, with resources running low.
Ah, this is the comic book I’ve been waiting months for. Black Science has finally ended its hiatus, and it starts off with a bang and never lets up the pressure.
C.O.W.L .is really shaping up into a great comic book. This issue gives us some context on another powered member of C.O.W.L., Kathryn Mitchell/Radia, and the distinctly unpleasant experience of being a female superhero in 1962. I really have to applaud this comic for taking a look at just how a woman would have been treated then (and in many respects is treated today), giving it a sense of historical authenticity.
Supreme is a long-running and infrequently reprinted Image comic created by Rob Liefeld and with an acclaimed run by Alan Moore that has now been revived by Warren Ellis. For those who haven’t read it, it was sort of a take on Superman. Supreme’s revival is almost more of a reimagining to help familiarize new readers with an old premise. Warren Ellis’ writing style and Tula Lotay have given this well-regarded series a fresh new face and an interesting, dream-like feel to it.
In The Wicked + the Divine #2, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie get down to business and start to explore the ideas of divinities as pop stars through the lens of their biggest fan Laura, the protagonist of the series and their biggest detractor, the aptly named Cassandra, a reporter and former comparative mythology student.
Cap’n Dinosaur Written by Kek-W Art by Shaky Kane Published by Image Comics Remember those old ads in comic books, like Charles Atlas muscle builders, Frankenstein masks, and of course, the infamous Sea Monkeys? Well, they’re back as the dastardly Carnevil of Crime in Cap’n Dinosaur, a one-shot making fun of all things Silver Age, including …
Black Science is the comic book that got me back into reading comic books. I’d stopped reading for a few years and was only reading Walking Dead when I saw the first issue in my local comic book store. I love science-fiction, and the book looked fun. Well, it’s been bad for my bank account, but this comic book has been simply incredible. Black Science is what I wish Sliders had become, with a totally limitless imagination for different realities and just how alien everything can be. Beware: spoilers do lie ahead, and this is not a book that is kind to its characters.
Walking Dead issues in the middle of an arc tend to be the least interesting. It’s not their fault except that it’s an issue of structure, and Kirkman’s writing means that the middle issues are setup for eventual payoff. There’s nothing wrong with it in the grand scheme of things. It’s just that we as readers won’t really appreciate until we know where it was taking us. The fact that this issue is likely tossing the readers a red herring in lieu of further plot developments bogs it down a bit.
Imagine what the world could have ended up as if John Carpenter’s The Thing got out of Antarctica, but a small segment of the population was immune to it. That’s the basic premise of Spread. Sure, the Spread is easier to kill, but it’s every bit as gruesome as to look at as The Thing, and spreads with alarming rapidity. Justin Jordan wrote that one of his inspirations was to tell a story set after an apocalypse, which puts this story right in the vein of The Walking Dead.
Red City #2 Written by Daniel Corey Art by Mark Dos Santos Published by Image Comics In the tradition of good film noir, this is a very confusing story to unravel. Even with the reference sheet detailing all of the characters and their various motivations, there are still a lot of alien species, political movements, …