Stephanie Hans

Kieron Gillen’s run on Journey into Mystery #622-645 is really the closest Marvel has come to telling a long form urban fantasy story about stories like Vertigo’s Sandman , and it survived multiple art shifts and even an extended crossover with the Fear Itself event. The premise of the series is ingenious as in the aftermath of the Siege event (which involved the much maligned and overused by Brian Michael Bendis character, the Sentry, finally getting thrown into the sun by Thor.), Loki has been resurrected as a child and hopes to avoid his villainous destiny.

Fans of the series should not miss Commerical Suicide, which gives deep character insight and thematic development to the questions of identity, personal and public, through disparate experiences and art that solidify the similarities inside celebrity and fan alike.

5. Paper Girls (Image) Paper Girls #1-3 Written by Brian K. Vaughan Art by Cliff Chiang Colors by Matthew Wilson Letters by Jared K. Fletcher Only three issues in, Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chiang’s Paper Girls has already piqued intense fandom. Grounded in the recognizably familiar–1988 Midwestern suburbia–with its head in the clouds–aliens on dinosaurs, time travelers, …

Gillen has said many times the series is about problematic people doing problematic things, and WicDiv #15 is no exception. With Amaterasu trying so hard to make her last years on Earth count for something, it makes her blind to people she could be hurting unintentionally. Well, not completely since she does listen to Cassandra when she tells her forming a giant fireball over Hiroshima is a really terrible idea. Still, with her time running out and her friends dropping off, it becomes a part of her own personal tragedy, which is what makes her in this issue so compelling.

Witch Hunter Angela #1 is a tasty cake with layers of Elizabethan style wordplay from Bennett, impeccable costume design from Sauvage and Hans, and puns and in-jokes from Gillen. Also, there’s finally a reference to Edmund Spenser of Faerie Queene fame and undergraduate toil in a Marvel comic. It is filled with subtle or not so subtle shots at everything from William Shakespeare (and a certain Marvel hero) being overused in pop culture to the fandom and good looks of a certain, once underrated character, but these shots are playful and not biting. And in its own winding way, it continues the arc of the friendship between Serah and Angela from the now wrapped Angela Asgard’s Assassin series. Come for the clever history, literature, and comics jokes and stay for a well-rendered and realized world courtesy of Marguerite Sauvage and Stephanie Hans.

Angela: Asgard’s Assassin #1 Written by Kieron Gillen and Marguerite Bennett Pencilled by Phil Jimenez; Art by Stephanie Hans Inked by Tom Palmer Colors by Romulo Fajardo Published by Marvel Comics Originally created by Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane for Spawn, Angela made her first appearance in the Marvel Universe at the end of the Age of Ultron event after a long legal battle. Since then, …

Much like Grant Morrison killing Batman before one of the Christopher Nolan films came out, Marvel killed Loki before The Avengers movie debuted. Looking at the cinematic Marvel oeuvre, if there’s a character who has taken on a life of his own, it’s Loki. Tom Hiddleston’s performance of the upstart brother of Thor and ungrateful …