I have a love/hate relationship with Mark Millar's work. When I was getting back into comics as an adult, his work with Frank Quitely and Bryan Hitch on The Authority and The Ultimates were fairly instrumental in keeping me reading. As time went on, though, and his books descended deeper into pandering to the lowest common denominator, I began losing interest. But he keeps working with artists ...

Like most of you, I've got a to-read stack that kills me every time I look at it. Friends laugh at it, small children cry at it, and the police keep giving me the stink eye. I've also got a to-read list for those things that I want to read in digital form, but haven't yet. There's a lot of webcomics in there (Chris Onstad returned to Achewood last year, you say?) and I've been remarkably lax ...

When I was a kid, there were two comics franchises that meant everything. The first was Spider-Man. He was my entryway into comic books, courtesy of Todd McFarlane and David Michelinie, and he made an indelible impression. The second franchise was the X-Men, especially the comics drawn by Jim Lee. While Spider-Man comics often had soap operatic elements, X-Men was soap opera through and ...

Don't ask me why -- I'm just a writer -- but humans are programmed to see patterns. It's why we see faces on Mars, religious figures in food, and conspiracies where there are none. Something in our brains wants to make that connection for us, no matter how insane it may seem to an outsider. (It's great if you're a blogger -- you can make a post out of any old thing if you can make a solid ...

On sale this week is B.P.R.D.: Vampire #1, a direct follow-up to B.P.R.D.: 1948, written (with an assist by Mike Mignola) and drawn by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá, colored by Dave Stewart, and lettered by Clem Robins. "Is it pretty?" you ask, curious. "Obviously," spits Chris Sims. He's right, though, curmudgeon that he is. This is a remarkably pretty book, which should come as no ...

I'm a simple man with simple tastes. I'm also a critic, and that means that I obsess over my simple tastes in an attempt to both quantify them and convince myself that they aren't simple. But at the same time... they are simple, and that's a wonderful thing. I know that I can find something to enjoy in anything that hits a few check boxes. I like stories about crime and violence. I like stories ...

I began rereading the Mike Allred and Peter Milligan era of X-Force on a lark, and here's something that's true: these comics might be the crown jewel of NuMarvel, even above my beloved New X-Men. They feel like genuine classics, the sort of tales that should be reprinted forever and forced on new readers. They're remarkably consistent on just about every level, and they approach sensitive ...

I'm starting to get the feeling that Garth Ennis doesn't like heroes very much. I don't mean superheroes, either. His ambivalence toward the spandex set is well-established and can easily be taken as read at this point. But heroes? The men and women we've built up to be larger than life and forces for good, immaculately moral and righteous? I'm starting to notice that he's pushing away from ...

I talked about some of the pros and cons associated with Mark Andrew Smith's Sullivan's Sluggers Kickstarter in November. Since then, he's been abusive to backers, failed to deliver comics to consumers while fulfilling orders to retailers, and has just recently launched a second Kickstarter with an extremely low goal in an attempt to raise further funds to ship books from the initial ...

True story: I bought Yuuki Kodama's Blood Lad almost entirely because of its cover. I was in my local Kinokuniya and noticed what looked suspiciously like a Gorillaz comic on the shelf. It wasn't, of course -- the closest we'll get is Rise of the Ogre -- but it did have an art style that tickled the same part of my brain that digs Jamie Hewlett's work. I was shopping with friends, and they gave ...