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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - June 27, 2012: Toss Them Up and Let Them Hit You on the Head

Douglas Wolk — 2012-06-26T12:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
% Spectacle
* Cash
^ History

^ % LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN VOL. 3: CENTURY #3 2009
Wow, it was really foresighted of Alan Moore to make a thinly disguised Christian Grey the final boss in the conclusion of his survey of the past century's worth of pulp-lit presences, considering how slowly Kevin O'Neill draws. Oh, did I spoil something? (Spoiler: I'm lying.)^ ALL-STAR WESTERN #10
The Jonah Hex story apparently ties into various Batman-related things, but the reason I'm calling it to your attention is this month's backup: a Bat Lash story drawn by the great José Luis Garcia-Lopez. I see from DC's advance solicitations that they're publishing a collection of his Superman stories next spring, too.

* BATMAN INCORPORATED #2
Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham spend an issue focusing on Talia, now that she's been set up as the big antagonist for this year of Inc.

^ % DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI DAREDEVIL BORN AGAIN ARTIST'S EDITION
It's a little harder than it used to be to hold in one's brain the idea that David Mazzucchelli and Frank Miller used to collaborate, although here's the evidence of their visually impressive run on Daredevil. This is a very pricy hardcover--$150--but it's Mazzucchelli's original art reproduced at actual size, and the earlier artist's-edition volumes IDW has done are all knockouts.

^ DEFENDERS BY MATT FRACTION VOL. 1
Of all of Fraction's current Marvel projects, this one seems to be the one where he's cutting loose the most--there's some really charming formal play and metafictional stuff, especially the '72-Marvel-style bottom-of-page commentary. Terry Dodson draws.

* DROPS OF GOD VOL. 4
More of Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimoto's wine snob manga! It'd be great to see, oh, at least half a dozen American monthly wine-snob series announced by the time Comic-Con's over. Can y'all do that for me?

^ FATALE: DEATH CHASES ME
I've become one of those trade-waiters that Ed Brubaker talks about in that remarkable Comics Reporter interview from this past weekend, at least where his collaborations with Sean Phillips are concerned--I just find I enjoy them most that way, despite the considerate addition of exclusive back-matter in the individual issues. This is the first collection of their current supernatural-noir series.

% FATIMA: THE BLOOD SPINNERS #1
A new Gilbert Hernandez miniseries from Dark Horse; this one's another B-movie sort of setup, with a lot more gore and (so far) less sex than usual. I can't think of many other creators whose career arcs could frame a turn-your-brain-off kill-the-zombies story as an aesthetic challenge to their readers.

% GLORIANA
This has to be at least the third incarnation to date of Kevin Huizenga's masterpiece--it was initially an issue of his minicomic Supermonster, then revised as an issue of his series Or Else. And what's it about, exactly? It's kind of about everything--at least representing a particular way of understanding (and diagramming) how everything works. It's also kind of about a sunset, and basketball, and a few other particular things. It's hard to explain. Just do yourself a favor and look at it, okay? Huizenga's frequent collaborator Dan Zettwoch also has a hardcover book out this week: Birdseye Bristoe, which looks fascinating and diagrammatic too.

^ JOURNALISM
On the strength of his last big book, the breathtaking Footnotes in Gaza, I can't imagine not reading anything the great war-correspondent cartoonist Joe Sacco publishes from now on. This is a collection of his shorter journalistic pieces from the past decade or so--stories reported Malta, Gaza, the Hague, the Caucasus, etc. (On the Diamond list, not the Midtown list.)

^ % JUDGE DREDD: THE COMPLETE CASE FILES VOL. 5
I've gone off on the subject of both of these books at some length on my own Dredd blog within the past week. The short version is: if you've been wondering what the great big deal about Dredd is, Complete Case Files 05 (previewed here yesterday), which reprints a year's worth of weekly episodes from 1981-1982 that are all co-written by John Wagner and Alan Grant, is probably the best introduction among the books currently in print in the U.S. It's got some excellent artwork from both Brian Bolland and Carlos Ezquerra (the two artists most closely associated with the series, whose approaches to it are very different); it also includes "Judge Death Lives" and "The Apocalypse War," a pair of serials whose repercussions are still everywhere in the series more than 30 years later. Also this week: When Judges Go Bad, which collects half a dozen Dredd one-shots and shorter storylines spanning roughly 1989-2005, with art by Dave Taylor, Steve Yeowell, John Burns and others, on the theme of crooked future cops. (On the Midtown list, not the Diamond list.)

* ^ % KIKI DE MONTPARNASSE
Catel Muller and José-Louis Bocquet's biography of the famous Modernist muse Alice "Kiki" Prin focuses mostly on the peak of her career; it's got lots of well-known artists and such making cameo appearances, but it's more a vehicle for Catel to draw people and a setting in which she's got a deep interest than a vehicle for a history lesson. I reviewed it over at the New York Times Book Review. (On the Midtown list, not the Diamond list.)

* ^ THE LOVELY HORRIBLE STUFF
Eddie Campbell is a superb raconteur--one of his great strengths is picking a topic and writing and drawing comics that kind of chat digressively around it. This one concerns money, and his relationship with it.

^ MANHATTAN PROJECTS #4
Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra's alternate-universe history of the atomic program seems to be dovetailing, in a couple of ways, with Hickman's Fantastic Four. Not like a crossover or anything, just... certain shared interests.

% MONSTER DINOSAUR
At some point, the youth of America are going to notice that Lewis Trondheim has been going to great lengths to entertain their generation for a long time, and glom onto the translations of his work that have appeared so far. I hope that point comes soon. (On the Midtown list, not the Diamond list.)

% PROPHET #26
While we're still waiting for the conclusion of the Farel Dalrymple-drawn two-parter, Brandon Graham both writes and draws this interlude issue.

* ^ RESET #3
I'm impressed with the way Peter Bagge has shifted from the "series" mindset of Hate to closed-ended stories like this one--it's changed direction with every issue so far. (It also seems like a sharper return visit to the territory of his 2010 graphic novel Other Lives.)

% TALES OF THE BEANWORLD VOL. 3.5
The first two collections of Larry Marder's wonderful ecosystem comic were drawn from the original series; the third was a standalone volume. This briefer one collects various color stories from the past 15 years, arranged into a connected sequence. Neat!

* ^ UNCLE SCROOGE: ONLY A POOR OLD MAN
Fantagraphics continues to be the gold standard for reprinting old comics material. This collection of Carl Barks' splendid Scrooge stories continues the formula of the Donald Duck volume from a few months ago: four long stories (including "Back to the Klondike"!), then a handful of shorter stories and one-page gags. (On the Midtown list, not the Diamond list.)

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - June 20, 2012: From a Finger to a Glove

Douglas Wolk — 2012-06-19T13:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
* Slaying the father
^ Stan is smilin'
% The end is not in sight

* BATMAN: THE BLACK GLOVE DELUXE EDITION HC
There are oversized hardcovers collecting most of Grant Morrison's Batman comics, but the early part of that run isn't available in a uniform edition, and collector culture means we must have uniform editions. So now there's this oversized $30 hardcover collecting the 15 issues' worth of material from Batman & Son and The Black Glove--but not the awkward crossover The Resurrection of Ra's Al Ghul that ran between them with a couple of Morrison-written chapters.

% BATWOMAN #10
Judging by #9, Trevor McCarthy, the new artist on this J.H. Williams III/W. Haden Blackman-written series, is drawing it in a very heavily Williams-esque style. I'm not complaining about that.

^ BILL THE BOY WONDER: THE SECRET CO-CREATOR OF BATMAN
Bob Kane legally gets the official credit for creating Batman, but it's not exactly a secret that Bill Finger did a lot of the heavy lifting. This biography of Finger is written by Marc Tyler Nobleman, with illustrations by the wonderful Ty Templeton. (It's on the Midtown Comics new-release list, not the Diamond Comic Distributors list.) Templeton also co-writes this week's Avenging Spider-Man #8 (with Dan Slott), drawn by Matthew Clark, an "Ends of the Earth" epilogue.

* ^ % CASANOVA: AVARITIA #4
Matt Fraction and Gabriel Bá's marvelous, densely woven time-and-space-and-hermeneutics series finally concludes its third arc. I understand why this is not the most regularly published of the series Fraction writes--although it's worth noting that two weeks after Avaritia #1 came out we got Fraction and Salvador Larroca's Invincible Iron Man #508, and this week we get #519 (as well as the Invincible Iron Man: Demon collection). Iron Man is a very solid superhero comic; Casanova, on the other hand, makes me happy to be alive at a time when a comic book this good is being serialized.

^ % DAREDEVIL #14
Mark Waid and Chris Samnee: that's quite a team. I generally like their projects individually, and they turn out to work really well together, maybe because they're both focused on meat-and-potatoes craft--doing familiar things in a particularly elegant way.

* ^ % JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #640
Kieron Gillen and Richard Elson continue the "Manchester Gods" storyline, which also means that they're continuing Gillen's parry to the Neil Gaiman bibliography, the most affectionate act of slaying the father I've seen in comics lately.

^ NEW AVENGERS #27
Apparently Brian Michael Bendis has figured out that it's much easier to sell a Power Man & Iron Fist comic if you call it New Avengers. Mike Deodato draws.

* ROGER LANGRIDGE'S SNARKED! #9
It's not quite clear how this is meant to be an ongoing series--now that Langridge's Lewis Carroll-derived cast has reached Snark Island, it sure feels like we're entering Act 3 of 3. What a pleasure this story is, though.

% SAGA #4
I don't know that Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' monthly science fiction/high fantasy epic is quite playing to Vaughan's strong points yet, although it's fun to see him pushing himself outside his comfort zone. And it's certainly playing to Staples' strong points--if there were a regular periodical this attractive-looking 25 years ago, it'd have seemed like an impossible stroke of luck.

^ 2000 AD #1784
John Wagner and Colin MacNeil wrap up the 20-part Judge Dredd serial Day of Chaos: Eve of Destruction, in which Wagner's made it clear that he's about to knock down 35 years' worth of plot dominoes, and Al Ewing and Brendan McCarthy wrap up The Zaucer of Zilk. Also this week: Judge Dredd Megazine #234, concluding Simon Spurrier and Carlos Ezquerra's Avengers parody, continuing Andy Diggle and Jock's "Snapshot," and including a separately bound collection of Steve Parkhouse's 2005 serial Tiger Sun, Dragon Moon. (Both appear on the Midtown list, not the Diamond list.)

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - June 13, 2012: All the Ships at Sea

Douglas Wolk — 2012-06-12T14:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
* Diving from above
^ Rising from below
% Sidling from sideways

^ % BATWOMAN VOL. 1: HYDROLOGY
J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman's version of this series has turned out to be really different in tone from the Greg Rucka/Williams version collected in Elegy--this is effectively a supernatural suspense story--but I'm enjoying it too. Speaking of Williams, this week also sees Seven Soldiers of Victory vol. 2--the $30 paperback reprint of the second half of the Grant Morrison-written project from a few years back, in which he provides the tour de force art for the closing chapter. And speaking of Seven Soldiers artists, Frazer Irving draws this week's Shade #9, written by James Robinson.

* ^ % THE BULLETPROOF COFFIN DISINTERRED #5
I'm guessing from the description that this issue of David Hine and Shaky Kane's increasingly unmoored-from-the-rigors-of-plot, increasingly wonderful salute to garage-sale back issue piles is some kind of riff on war comics and "Mars Attacks!"

* DC COMICS PRESENTS: SUPERMAN ADVENTURES #1
I'm generally a Mark Millar skeptic these days, but if you'd like to see what his writing's kind of whizz-bang enthusiasm looks like without nastiness or cynicism riding on its back, I direct your attention to his entirely charming late-'90s run on Superman Adventures, the first four issues of which are reprinted here for eight bucks. (And while you're rooting around in that particular back issue bin, may I point out that Scott McCloud also wrote a year's worth of that series?)

^ THE MASSIVE #1
Brian Wood has been describing his and Kristian Donaldson's new, ongoing series about a ship full of postapocalyptic environmentalists as part of the beginning of "the second major phase of his career." It's not quite clear what that means, but I'm looking forward to finding out.

* % SPIDER-MEN #1
The heavily hyped 616/Ultimate crossover by Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli; I suppose after this long there's no longer a point in pretending that Ultimate is its own new-reader-friendly standalone continuity. Also this week in the Bendis department: Avengers #27 (drawn by Walter Simonson) and Avengers Assemble #4 (drawn by his old Ultimate Spider-Man collaborator Mark Bagley).

^ % 2000 AD #1782/1783
Those are the issues that Midtown Comics' site claims we're getting this week; per Diamond, it's #1779-1781. Anyway, these two issues continue John Wagner and Colin MacNeil's Judge Dredd serial "Eve of Destruction" (part of the 40-plus-week buildup to "Day of Chaos," which begins in #1786), as well as Alan Grant and Steve Yeowell's retro-ish "Cadet Anderson: Algol," Brendan McCarthy and Al Ewing's bizarre "The Zaucer of Zilk," and more.

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - June 6, 2012: Tonight None Of You Will Sleep Here

Douglas Wolk — 2012-06-05T11:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
* From the people who brought you "X-Ships"
^ Sex panic
% Prosolar

* % ACTION COMICS #10
Grant Morrison and Gene Ha open their three-part summer story with "Clark Kent Is Dead"--G.Mo seems to have a particular set of story premises that he keeps circling back to lately. Loved last month's "what if Superman were sold to a corporation with not-particularly-commendable motives?" story, though.

% BACK ALLEYS AND URBAN LANDSCAPES
I love Michael Cho's high-contrast, two-tone images of everything from street scenes to superheroes. (Have a look at his blog.) This book is much more the former--drawings he's done around his home town of Toronto.

* ^ BEFORE WATCHMEN: MINUTEMEN #1
I've never seen a Darwyn Cooke comic that wasn't at least a pleasure to look at. But I also can't think of many comics about which I've felt this intensely conflicted, and beyond the obvious maddening things about this project (among them the fact that Watchmen is a hermetically perfect sphere that doesn't need anything not already present on the page), I would really, really love to see Cooke work on something that was entirely his own creation. In circumstantially related releases, Chris Roberson and Mike Allred's iZombie #26 is out this week too.

* % DARK AVENGERS #175
The Brian Michael Bendis/Mike Deodato incarnation of Dark Avengers was essentially a continuation of the Warren Ellis/Deodato period of Thunderbolts--they've got very similar concepts, in some ways--and with this issue, Jeff Parker and Declan Shalvey's Thunderbolts changes its title to get in on the still-apparently-golden Avengers franchise.

* DIAL H #2
I wasn't totally convinced by the first issue of China Miéville and Mateus Santolouco's revival of what's arguably DC's most naff superhero franchise, but I trust Miéville's writing enough that I'm still very curious to see where this goes.

% DMZ VOL. 12: THE FIVE NATIONS OF NEW YORK
The wrapup of Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli's little Vertigo title that could. DMZ wasn't an easy series to love--it didn't offer the obvious pleasures of, say, Y: The Last Man or Fables, or the consistency and goal-directedness of 100 Bullets. But it was a very smart series, with an incredibly strong aesthetic, and it's the best American comic about the Iraq war so far. I think it'll be a fascinating period piece to come back to in future decades.

* ^ EARTH 2 #2
When I got off an airplane last Friday, there was a message waiting for me from a cable TV network that said they'd really like to interview me about Green Lantern was coming out. I wrote back and explained that this was not the first gay superhero or the first gay comic book character, and that the Green Lantern in question was not the first one most people would think of when you said "Green Lantern" (or the second, or the third), and had really only been a minor supporting character for the past 60 years or so, and that, as with so many things, It's Complicated. James Robinson writes, Nicola Scott draws. Also this week: Earth 2's companion title, Worlds' Finest #2, by Paul Levitz, George Pérez and Kevin Maguire--I really enjoyed the first issue, although it has one of the worst logos I've seen recently.

^ % ED THE HAPPY CLOWN
This is, I believe, the fifth iteration of Chester Brown's early masterpiece--specifically, a totally bonkers, super-scatological, sexually and religiously confused, deeply felt early masterpiece, originally serialized in Yummy Fur in the '80s, collected twice before (with different endings), and re-serialized a couple of years ago. This version is a $25 hardcover, with a new foreword and notes (presumably the notes from the recent serial version).

* GREEN ARROW #10
Written by Ann Nocenti, drawn by Oliver Nome--the latter of whom is currently trying to raise money for a life-saving operation. If you like his work, maybe think about buying a page or two of his original art.

* JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #639
Kieron Gillen and Richard Elson (I believe) launch a new storyline, two weeks after the last issue, and one week after the conclusion of "Exiled." Just go ahead and make Gillen's J.I.M. a weekly, Marvel! That would totally work! Speaking of comics-making machines, this week also sees Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca's Invincible Iron Man #518, as well as Fraction and John Romita Jr.'s Avengers Vs. X-Men #5.

^ % MAGGIE THE MECHANIC
So you hear people talking all the time about Jaime Hernandez and how he's one of the most amazing cartoonists working in the English language and all that, and there are so many Love and Rockets collections in so many formats, and where do you start? If you're one of the people who prefers to start at the beginning, there is a new printing of this stout little paperback out this week, which collects his earliest, sci-fi/punk-type "Locas" and "Mechanics" stories, as well as a new printing of the second volume, The Girl From H.O.P.P.E.R.S., in which he hits the groove in which he's stayed most of the time since then. I never get tired of re-reading these.

* POPEYE #2
Roger Langridge writes; Ken Wheaton draws one story, the mighty Tom Neely the other (involving Sappo, and let me just say that it takes a hardcore E.C. Segar fan to ever want to write a Sappo story). I don't know how many people noticed in the first issue that Popeye's first line of dialogue here was the same as his first line from "Thimble Theatre" ("D'ja think I'm a cowboy?"), but it put me at ease right away.

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - May 30, 2012: The Low Life Theory

Douglas Wolk — 2012-05-29T13:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
* "But it's not really a superhero comic"
^ Yes, people drew things before Action #1
% Dating is difficult

* BATMAN: DEATH BY DESIGN
Book designer supreme Chip Kidd is famously a heavy-duty Batman collector, and he's written a couple of prose novels, although I think this is the first graphic novel he's written. It's a very strange, fumingly mannered book, with more clumps of expository dialogue than I've seen anywhere in a while, but it's fun on its own terms; it concerns the architecture of Gotham City (and the principles of architecture in general), and was apparently inspired by the demolition of the original Pennsylvania Station. Dave Taylor's artwork, rendered in graphite over blue pencil, is mighty enjoyable too, although I'm scratching my head a little at the plucky, heroic young architect drawn to look exactly like (minor coughing fit) Chip Kidd.

* % ANGELMAN: FALLEN ANGEL
A really weird, somewhat adorable little book by the Austrian artist Nicolas Mahler that I am happy to suspect is as close as Fantagraphics is ever going to come to publishing superhero comics. It's a minimalist reaction against, and parody of, mainstream comics' conventions of character, storytelling, drawing, design, financial structure, interaction with their readers... it's attractively executed for sure, and pretty funny, although I kept thinking of that "Crisis of Conformity" sketch on SNL for some reason.

* % EMPOWERED VOLUME 7
Adam Warren's curiously non-exploitative exploitation series continues.

^ % FAIRY TALES OF OSCAR WILDE VOL. 4: THE DEVOTED FRIEND/THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE ROSE
Now that the fifth volume's out, here's a new edition of an earlier instance of the glorious P. Craig Russell cultivating "an attachment a la Plato for a bashful young potato or a not-too-French French bean."

* % GLAMOURPUSS #25
Wow--it really has been four years since the first issue. (A bit more, even: glamourpuss #1 came out April 30, 2008.) I appreciate how this has become the "whatever the hell Dave Sim feels like drawing this month" comic book, as much as I miss the old days when Sim was one of the best storytellers in comics; for all the things he's deliberately shucked away from himself in the past couple of decades, I wouldn't have guessed that narrative and characters would be among them.

* MEGA-CITY UNDERCOVER VOL. 2
The most tempting of the many Judge Dredd-related titles out this week in the U.S. is the second collection of "Low Life," a series about undercover cops in the "Dredd" universe, written by Rob Williams and drawn by the wonderful D'Israeli, among others. "Low Life" is one of those situations, like "Thimble Theatre" or "Fritzi Ritz," in which a series' supporting character turns out to be interesting enough to take over the whole thing--in this case, Dirty Frank, a magnificent, tragicomic invention who seemed at first like a two-panel throwaway and is now indisputably "Low Life"'s star.

Also this week: 2000 AD #1779-1781, for which the big publicity blitz was around the fact that the Dark Judges return in the John Wagner/Colin MacNeil episode of "Judge Dredd" in #1781. The surprising thing about that was that they really had been gone for a long time--they're hugely popular villains, but they hadn't turned up since Batman/Judge Dredd: Die Laughing in 1998. (Imagine if the Joker's appearance in Batman and Robin had been preceded by 14 years without a Joker story, and that'll give you some idea of the dramatic impact.) The other highlight of these issues is Brendan McCarthy and Al Ewing's psychedelic freakout "The Zaucer of Zilk." On top of that, this week sees Judge Dredd Megazine #323, featuring an "Avengers" parody and a collection of Simon Spurrier and Boo Cook's bonkers sci-fi take on British imperialism, "Harry Kipling (Deceased)"; Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files vol. 19, an early-'90s collection that wraps up the Garth Ennis-written era and also includes some episodes written by Mark Millar and Grant Morrison; and budget-priced, digest-size, black-and-white editions of the early Dredd storylines The Cursed Earth Saga and The Day the Law Died (sadly, the difference between the proportions of the original printed pages and the little digests means that they're reproduced even tinier than they might otherwise be).

% MONSIEUR JEAN: SINGLES THEORY
The French cartoonists Dupuy and Berberian's Monsieur Jean series, about a young man strolling into being not-so-young-any-more, has been arriving in English in a strange order. As I understand (and please correct me if you know better), 2006's Get a Life collected vols. 1-3, originally published 1991-1994; Drawn and Quarterly vol. 3, in 2000, included Monsieur Jean vol. 4, from 1998; Drawn and Quarterly vol. 5, in 2003, included Monsieur Jean vol. 5, from 2001. And this new book, published by Humanoids rather than D&Q, is a translation of an unnumbered volume that appeared in French in 2000, between volumes 4 and 5, although it's set between volumes 3 and 4. Whatever. It's probably great.

^ MR. TWEE DEEDLE
I have the name Johnny Gruelle permanently stuck in my memory from the Raggedy Ann & Andy books I used to look at as a kid. He was a comic-strip artist, too, and Mr. Twee Deedle ran from 1911 to 1914 after he won a New York Herald competition. It's gorgeous stuff, given the Sunday Press-style super-oversize treatment in this $75 hardcover--those who like "Little Nemo in Slumberland" and/or "Maakies" (whose Tony Millionaire wrote the introduction here" should certainly have a look at it.

* % NEW MUTANTS #43
Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Kieron Gillen and Carmine Di Giandomenico conclude "Exiled," this title's five-week crossover with Journey Into Mystery.

% RASL #14
This is the penultimate issue of Jeff Smith's dimension-hopping-art-thief serial, and I'm already starting to wonder what his next comics project is going to be.

^ ROGER LANGRIDGE'S SNARKED! #8
The second arc of Langridge's Lewis Carroll-inspired fantasia wraps up here, with (among other things) an explanation of what "frumious" means in reference to bandersnatches. Snarked! is one of the most reliably entertaining serial comics around at the moment, and a huge hit with the first-grader critic in the house.

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - May 23, 2012: Incorporate the Dark Knight

Douglas Wolk — 2012-05-22T13:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
^ Bagman
* Wingman
% Swagman

* BATMAN INCORPORATED #1
I believe Grant Morrison described his initial plan for the second year of this international-minded Batman-and-his-team book as being "a roller coaster ride through hell." The relaunch is arriving a little late to the starting line, and who knows how much Morrison's had to retool it given that the rest of the Bat-books have been rebooted outright, but it still sounds pretty promising--especially since Chris Burnham is drawing it, at least initially.

^ THE COMIC BOOK HISTORY OF COMICS
Ryan Dunlavey and Fred Van Lente's Comic Book Comics had a good Dept. of Redundancy Dept. title, but the name of its collection explains a bit more clearly what they're up to here--a flippant but basically accurate survey of the history of the medium, in the vein of their earlier Action Philosophers!

^ % DARK HORSE PRESENTS #12
The part of me that enjoyed 1988 enormously is happy to see an anthology with Mike Baron and Steve Rude returning to Nexus, Dean Motter returning to Mister X, Evan Dorkin returning to Milk & Cheese, Sam Kieth drawing Aliens, etc. The part of me that really wants to revel in the present scratches his head at all of those appearing in the same place, would prefer to see those creators pushing forward more, and wishes that the Harlan Ellison story with a Richard Corben illustration had been written more recently than 1994, but is also psyched about the Carla Speed McNeil and Francesco Francavilla material in here.

* IRREDEEMABLE #37
Drawn by Diego Barretto, this is the final issue of Mark Waid's "what if Superman were a horrible person?" series; it's been up and down, but at its best it had an sense of indignant cruelty about it that gave it a distinct flavor. Speaking of Superman and cruelty, this week's Superman #9, by Keith Giffen and Dan Jurgens, introduces "new supervillainess MASOCHIST." She better not pull that on Rorschach around any elevator shafts, is all I'm saying.

% JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #638
Kieron Gillen, Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Carmine Di Giandomenico continue "Exiled," their quick, irreverent crossover between this title and New Mutants.

^ % MIND MGMT #1
Many years ago, there was a short-lived New York band called Attitude & Couture, all of whose songs were, one way another, about espionage. ("This song is called 'Old Lady Spy'!") Matt Kindt is basically the same way. This is the first issue of his new ongoing series about "a network of psychic spies." Its publisher Dark Horse is including in their publicity material my saying that I'll read anything Kindt does, and that's true--I've really enjoyed the three thrashed-out preview stories Dark Horse's app has featured so far.

% PROPHET #25
Note: this issue, unlike the previous one, is not actually drawn by Farel Dalrymple, despite the solicitation--the artist is Giannis Milanogiannis. It's pleasantly Heavy Metalloid, though, and I love that writer Brandon Graham has turned a Rob Liefeld series, of all things, into an introspective, minor-key science fiction project.

^ ROGUE TROOPER: TALES OF NU-EARTH VOL. 1
Both Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' names appear on the cover of this fat volume of early-'80s 2000 AD material, but this is hardly proto-Watchmen; Moore's contributions are limited to two six-page stories, neither of them drawn by Gibbons. The latter's art in the early episodes is terrific (and there's some fine work by Brett Ewins and Cam Kennedy later on too), but--very unusually for him--he didn't letter most of them himself, for reasons that are detailed in David Bishop's book Thrill-Power Overload but boil down to the idea that Gibbons found Gerry Finley-Day's scripts unbearable. That said, Finley-Day was by all accounts one of the great idea men of British comics, and the premise of Rogue Trooper is an ingenious hybrid of gritty trench-warfare serials like Charley's War and space opera, with a little bit of "roving samurai without a master" thrown in. It was also pretty radical at the time to create an SF/war comics serial suggesting that neither side was particularly in the right and that war itself turned all combatants into monsters, an idea that would be developed a few years later in Bad Company and the third volume of Moore and Ian Gibson's Halo Jones.

* ^ TRUE BLOOD #1
It's a TV tie-in with a photo-based cover, but those who enjoy the show might want to note the credits here: this issue is written by Ann Nocenti with the series' actor Michael McMillian, and drawn by Michael Gaydos (who seems to be doing a lot of licensed-from-other-media gigs lately).

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Let The Beat DROKK: Geoff Barrow & Ben Salisbury On The Music Of Mega-City One

Douglas Wolk — 2012-05-16T11:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Interviews, Video, Music, News, Culture

The instrumental album DROKK: Music Inspired By Mega-City One came out last week. The work of Geoff Barrow (best known as a core member of Portishead) and the film composer Ben Salisbury, it's a tribute to the synthesizer-based movie soundtracks of the Blade Runner era, as well as to the setting of Judge Dredd, the cult-favorite future-cop serial that's been running weekly in the British anthology 2000 AD for 35 years now. (In the slang of Dredd's world, "drokk" means, roughly, "goddamn it!") There is, of course, a Dredd movie coming out this fall, but DROKK isn't quite its soundtrack -- although it started out that way. We spoke to Barrow and Salisbury about the project, and about their connection to 2000 AD and Judge Dredd.

COMICS ALLIANCE: What were the origins of DROKK?

GEOFF BARROW: Ben Salisbury and I have known each other for years as... terrible sportsmen, really, playing in the same soccer team, and we would chat about the possibility of working together on something. I was approached by a friend who introduced me to Alex Garland, the screenwriter of Dredd. In the very early stages, Ben and I worked on it, and that's when our involvement in the film stopped -- I can't really go into it any further.

But it was a really enjoyable experience, and as a 2000 AD reader from a very early age, I thought "we've got this material, we really like it, let's put a record out." It seemed absolutely fitting to say that it was inspired by Mega-City One, 'cause that's what it was.

BEN SALISBURY: We made it almost entirely on these old analog synths that we both have, the Oberheim from 1975. Normally, I work with big orchestras, but Geoff said "we've got to be pure and raw and heavy with this." Now that I've read some 2000 AD, I understand why he was so strict. What I find interesting is that the music has a sort of history -- it's obviously influenced by the late '70s and early '80s sci-fi soundtracks that we both love. There are a lot of weird things going on with time in 2000 AD: it's a future setting, but there's a lot of satire of the past. I read the Judge Dredd book Muzak Killer -- it's all references to '80s pop, but set a hundred years in the future. The sort of nostalgic but futuristic music we were doing seemed to make sense, really.

CA: And it's using an instrument that was the sound of the future 35 years ago! You also used some time-stretched instruments -- one of the very first Judge Dredd stories mentions a time-stretcher, actually.

SALISBURY: That was just to get another sort of sound palette into the mix. They're all acoustic instruments. I'd come up with a bed for a time-stretched performance on a hammer dulcimer or some strings or something, and then try to record a top line by playing something amazingly fast, as fast as I could.

CA: What's your personal history with 2000 AD?

BARROW: It was incredibly important for me, really. I suffer from dyslexia, so it kind of bridged the gap -- it really helped. I grew up reading Topper and a few of the war comics like Valiant and Victor. My grandmother worked in a newsagent's, and when she brought back a 2000 AD, I was completely absorbed from then on. That was around 1982. It would have had Judge Dredd, Tharg's Future Shocks, Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper, and I also remember Ace Trucking Co. and The Ballad of Halo Jones. I was really into the "Cursed Earth" stuff. I'd bring the new 2000 AD home and draw my own copy of it. It was always my dream to be a comic book artist. I kept a keen eye on anything I saw that was Dredd-related -- it even got me into a bit of Batman. I continued up until, I would imagine, I got into a serious relationship. Over the years, I would pick up the odd graphic novel. But I actually find it quite difficult if stories become too involved -- my reading is just not good enough. I never understood what the hell was going on in Nemesis the Warlock.

CA: I don't know if anyone did. A lot of the track titles on DROKK are references to bits of Dredd history -- "Council of Five," "Titan Bound," "2T(fru)T." Who came up with them?

BARROW: I worked very closely with my best friend on them -- he's an album art designer named Marc Bessant. He's a complete nut. We'd ride skateboards together as kids, discussing who was going to play Dredd in the film. It was always going to be Clint Eastwood, obviously!

CA: Do you have any favorite Judge Dredd storylines?

BARROW: I think "Democracy." You know, that whole thing about the antihero, and reading about Dredd and how hard he is -- if you live your life in a fairly law-abiding way, you want Dredd to exist. But "Democracy" is just so extreme, and it really gets to the character and what he believes in. All these years I thought he was really cool, and it was the most shocking thing to me.

SALISBURY: I've only got a small knowledge of 2000 AD, but I can see why people really got into it. It's very interesting to have this hero character who... is he a good guy? is he a bad guy? I've got stacks of Geoff's comics now. What's the Judge Dredd story I just read? "America!" That was amazing!

DROKK: Music Inspired by Mega-City One is available now via digital download as well as a variety of physical formats, including a metal film canister vinyl records, a t-shirt and a limited edition print.

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - May 16, 2012: The Devil and the Long Pigs

Douglas Wolk — 2012-05-15T12:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
* Dystopian futures
^ Dystopian presents
% Dystopian pasts

* 100 MONTHS
This sounds amazing. John Hicklenton was one of the most over-the-top artists in the history of British comics--he drew incredibly grotesque, powerful stuff, including two books of Nemesis the Warlock, Pandora, a few "Heavy Metal Dredd" stories and (as John Deadstock) the American series ZombieWorld. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, he wrote and drew this environmentalist graphic novel about a war between Satan's daughter and an evil capitalist god, which is apparently all full-page images. The day after Hicklenton completed it, he died at an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland.^ AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: ENDS OF THE EARTH #1
The "event " that didn't actually cross over into anything gets a one-shot tie-in, by Dan Slott and Thony Silas, in which its title is justified by looks at what various Marvel Universe types who live outside North America are doing. In other Marvel-event news, Brian Michael Bendis and Walter Simonson's Avengers #26 is an AvX tie-in, and Dan Abnett and Carmine Di Giandomenico's New Mutants #42 is part three of "Exiled."

% ARE YOU MY MOTHER? A COMIC DRAMA
Alison Bechdel's previous memoir Fun Home blindsided and/or gobsmacked pretty much everyone who wasn't already familiar with her from "Dykes to Watch Out For." Her follow-up--an examination of her relationship with her mother, her creative process, and psychotherapy--hit bookstores a couple of weeks ago, I believe, but this week it's in comics shops, and I can't think of a book I've been looking forward to more this year. I do miss the warm ensemble comedy of her comic strip, but there are a lot more people who can approximate that than who can pull off her kind of laser-focused, revelatory introspection.

^ BATWOMAN #9
Artist Amy Reeder has departed this series due to creative differences; J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman are still writing it, but this arc is being finished up by Trevor McCarthy. I liked McCarthy's work on Gates of Gotham--his design sensibility reminds me a bit of the late Gene Day.

% BEST OF ENEMIES: A HISTORY OF U.S. AND MIDDLE EAST RELATIONS, VOL. 1
Admirers of David B.'s work (Epileptic, in particular, is one of my favorite graphic novels) are directed to this terrific curio: B's selective, stylized look at several centuries' worth of an uneasy cross-cultural tango, leading up to the US-backed coup in Iran in 1953. It's co-written by historian Jean-Pierre Filiu.

* ^ DAREDEVIL #13
The third issue of the Mark Waid-written series in four weeks, and the third artist, this time Khoi Pham. Also in the "didn't we just see one of these?" department: the third issue of Invincible Iron Man in five weeks, this time #517. Are we absolutely sure "Salvador Larroca" isn't the name of a small country?

* DEADENDERS
Arguably the bridge between Ed Brubaker's early crime comics (especially Lowlife) and his later superhero stuff, this mod/SF Vertigo series ran sixteen issues from 2000 to 2001. This $30 trade collects the whole series; an earlier collection was just the first four issues.

% FAIRY TALES OF OSCAR WILDE: THE HAPPY PRINCE
The great fantasy artist P. Craig Russell finally gets around to the fifth volume of the series he's been working on for twenty years or so. Over at the NBM blog, he talks about it a bit. (This week also sees a new edition of the first volume, "The Selfish Giant" and "The Star Child.") This means the only Wilde fairy tale he hasn't gotten to yet is, I believe, "The Fisherman and His Soul."

% THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS #3
Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra continue their cracked and reassembled history of 20th-century science with a look at how the atomic bomb got dropped in their parallel universe. Also this week in the "Hickman's revisionist history" department: Fantastic Four #605.1, subtitled "The Secret History of the Fantastic Four."

* SAGA #3
It's still hard to accustom myself to Brian K. Vaughan writing a monthly series again. I'm not complaining, though, and artist Fiona Staples is a very good match for him.

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - May 9, 2012: Inimitable, Incredible, Indefatigable

Douglas Wolk — 2012-05-08T12:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
* Remarkable writer/artists who started still-unfinished projects in the '90s
^ Five
% At least some character-creator involvement
¢ At least some creator ownership
Comics adjectives are the best

% ¢ SPACE DUCKS: AN INFINITE COMIC BOOK OF MUSICAL GREATNESS
Anyone know if Daniel Johnston has published a comic book before? At this point, he's built up enough cred in the fine-art world that it's kind of hard to tell the difference between his actual obsessions and the things that are expected of him. This graphic novel involves a struggle with Satan, lots of misspellings, some sexual desperation, wordplay based on Beatles lyrics, and a lot of art-brut sloppiness; it ties in with some new music from him, and the "Editor," "Publisher" and "Editor-in-Chief" credits go to people who bought those titles on Kickstarter. That said, I'm really happy to see this, and if Marvel ever does another one of those Strange Tales miniseries, I can't think of a more apropos idea than a Daniel Johnston Captain America story.% ^ ¢ 2000 AD #1776-1778
If you picked up the Free Comic Book Day special issue... well, three of the creators involved with that one (and one of its five strips) are also in these three issues, which are smack in the middle of five serials right now: John Wagner and Henry Flint's extended Judge Dredd storyline "Day of Chaos: Eve of Destruction," Pat Mills and James McKay's "Flesh," Al Ewing and Brendan McCarthy's "The Zaucer of Zilk," Alec Worley and Jon Davis-Hunt's "Age of the Wolf," and Robbie Morrison and John Burns' "Nikolai Dante." Also out in the States this week, per the Midtown Comics list (but not the Diamond Comics Distributors list, which also omits 2000 AD #1776 and 1777, curiously): Judge Dredd Megazine #322, featuring the first episode of Andy Diggle and Jock's "Snapshot," whose pitch might have been something like "Blow-Up, but set in a comic book store, and without the sexy parts."

AVENGING SPIDER-MAN #7
Kathryn and Stuart Immonen, together again! I loved their 2010 graphic novel Moving Pictures. I bet this isn't much like that. I also bet it's good.

* ¢ DAN THE UNHARMABLE #1
The first issue of an ongoing series by David Lapham and Rafael Ortiz about an invulnerable P.I. is also my twelfth-or-so opportunity to briefly wonder if we'll ever see Lapham do more Stray Bullets.

% ESSENTIAL BLACK PANTHER VOL. 1
I'm very curious about this: a $20 black-and-white paperback collecting Jungle Action #6-22 and 24 (the Don McGregor-written run from 1972-1976), plus Black Panther #1-10 (most but not all of the subsequent Jack Kirby run).

* % ¢ iZOMBIE #25
Well, at least the rest of Chris Roberson and Michael Allred's monsters-a-go-go series still gets to come out. Allred also has a piece in this week's Mystery in Space one-shot, as does Paul Pope.

^ JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #637
Kieron Gillen and Carmine di Giandomenico continue the five-part "Exiled" crossover with New Mutants.

* % MYSTERIOUS TRAVELER: THE STEVE DITKO ARCHIVES VOL. 3
This $40, Blake Bell-edited volume reprints horror stories drawn by Ditko in the late '50s for Charlton Comics titles including Tales of the Mysterious Traveler and This Magazine Is Haunted.

^ NEW AVENGERS #26
AvX, Brian Michael Bendis, Mike Deodato, Iron Fist and Phoenix. We know what we're getting with this stuff. Also this week: Bendis and Mark Bagley's Avengers Assemble #3. Speaking of which, would anyone like to take a guess at the number of Diamond shipping updates so far this year that have not included at least one announcement of a delay on a Bendis-written Icon title? (See key for answer.)

* % SILVER SURFER: PARABLE
A $25 reprint of the two-issue Stan Lee/Moebius project from 1988, plus Lee and Keith Pollard's 1990 graphic novel Silver Surfer: The Enslavers. Note to the cynical: this was solicited in November, and Moebius died in March.

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - May 2, 2012: Time is Actually Speeding Up

Douglas Wolk — 2012-05-01T13:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
* Don't say the name
^ Retro-novelty
% The myth about the microphone

^ % THE BULLETPROOF COFFIN DISINTERRED #4
I'm guessing this is the pamphlet-form comic book of this week that people are most likely to gasp at discovering a few decades from now: David Hine and Shaky Kane's loosely coherent salute to weird old comic books goes fully fragmentary, with 84 panels that connect to the ongoing iconography of the project but not, directly, to each other.

* ^ ACTION COMICS #9
In which Grant Morrison and Gene Ha bring back the black President Superman character from the opening scene of Final Crisis #7 (and Ha's cover owes a bit to Alex Ross's Obama-as-Superman painting). Also in the Morrison department: the paperback version of Batman And Robin Must Die!, reprinting B&R #13-16 and Batman: The Return #1. There's some remarkable Frazer Irving artwork in those Batman and Robin issues.

^ AVENGERS VS. X-MEN #3
Ed Brubaker and John Romita, Jr. do the honors this time--although Romita's artwork in the preview looks like he's in his "I had to draw this in a heck of a hurry" mode. Meanwhile, Romita's former Daredevil collaborator Ann Nocenti writes this week's Green Arrow #9, drawn by Harvey Tolibao.

^ DAREDEVIL #12
Wait, wasn't there one of these just last week? Anyway, this is by Mark Waid and new apparently-regular artist Chris Samnee--hooray!--and has another incredibly good Paolo Rivera cover. But something does seem to be a little screwy about Marvel's scheduling this week. Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca's Invincible Iron Man has consistently appeared the third week of every month for a good long while, so it's a head-scratcher to see #516 coming out two weeks after #515 (Fraction and Victor Ibanez's Defenders #6 is also out this week, two weeks after #5). Is something in AvX going to Change Everything? Or is Marvel just trying to push out a bunch of new issues before Free Comic Book Day?

% ^ DIAL "H" #1
The novelist China Miéville has been publishing award-winning "weird fiction" for a decade or so, but as far as I know he hasn't published any comics before this one (despite a near-miss with Swamp Thing a year or so ago)--a revival of a grade-Z DC franchise about a magic rotary telephone dial that turns people into different superheroes every time it's used. Apparently, Miéville just really, really likes that idea. The interior art is by Mateus Santoluoco, although the covers by Brian Bolland are a welcome connection to the look of The Invisibles.

% ^ EXILED #1
A one-shot by Kieron Gillen, Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Carmine Di Giandomenico, kicking off a "mini-crossover" between Journey Into Mystery and New Mutants--two issues of each will follow, I believe.

* ^ ROGER LANGRIDGE'S SNARKED! VOL. 1
I'm going to keep jumping up and down and pointing excitedly at Langridge's all-ages, Lewis Carroll-inspired series until more people start paying attention to it, in part because by "all-ages" Langridge means that there are incredibly entertaining things here for kids -and for their parents. I believe this is the first four issues plus the material from #0, but don't quote me on that. Also in the nicely crafted all-ages comics department, there's a Skeleton Key one-shot, collecting the three stories Andi Watson wrote and drew in color for the online incarnation of Dark Horse Presents.

* % SANDMAN VOL. 9: THE KINDLY ONES
Giant "Neil Gaiman" plastered across the front of this new paperback edition. Eight artists' names in tiny, tiny type. That said, Marc Hempel is really the star of this volume--it has a specific, haunting look to it, more than any other volume of the original run of Sandman taken as a whole.

* ^ WORLDS' FINEST #1
This is one of those titles that really only makes sense to people who've been reading superhero comics for a very long time. World's Best Comics #1 appeared in early 1941, and changed its title to World's Finest Comics with the next issue. It was initially an anthology with a bunch of ongoing superhero features; from 1954 to its final issue in late 1985, it was the Superman/Batman team-up series, aside from a couple of years in the early '70s. There have been a few miniseries and one-shots with World's Finest or similar titles since then (e.g. World's Funnest), usually having to do with the Batman/Superman dynamic in one way or another. Now the apostrophe has moved over a letter (because it's a parallel-worlds story, see) for a new ongoing series about the distantly Superman- and Batman-related characters Power Girl and the Huntress, written by Paul Levitz and drawn by George Pérez and Kevin Maguire.

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - April 25, 2012: He Lives in a Garbage Can

Douglas Wolk — 2012-04-24T12:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
* Seabound
^ Landlocked
% Airborne

* POPEYE #1
I can't think of a more appropriate writer than Roger Langridge to take on the newest (miniseries) comic book incarnation of E.C. Segar's sailor man, and Bruce Ozella's artwork for this issue is very much in the Segarian mode. (The regular cover's a cute homage to Action Comics #1; the variant is a Jules Feiffer sketch, which is a good idea too.) Langridge, in his formidable writer/artist capacity, also has Snarked! #7 out this week, continuing his wildly charming (and not entirely un-Segar-like) take on Lewis Carroll's creations.

% BLACK ORCHID DELUXE EDITION
Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's 1988 miniseries isn't quite Sandman or Violent Cases, but it's interesting as a very early take on a shared-universe/franchise project by both of them. This edition is a $25 hardcover.

^ DAREDEVIL #11
Mark Waid and Marco Checchetto conclude the "Omega Effect" cross-over with Avenging Spider-Man and Punisher. It's been a fun story so far, but it's also underscored how far the normal vibe of each character has to be altered for them to coexist in a functional plot at this point.

^ FRAZETTA FUNNY STUFF
The late Frank Frazetta was best known for his fantasy and sci-fi comics, but early in his career he tried his hand at anything that could pay the bills, including the comedy and funny-animal stories collected in this $50 hardcover (the "Li'l Abner" knockoff "Louie Lazybones" will apparently be among them).

^ JERUSALEM: CHRONICLES FROM THE HOLY CITY
The Quebecois cartoonist Guy Delisle's previous comics travelogues Pyongyang, Shenzhen and Burma Chronicles have all been fascinating and charming, and advance word on this one is promising too. It'd be great to see his fictional comics translated into English as well.

* ^ LEVIATHAN
I've got a soft spot for almost everything by the writer/artist team of Ian Edginton and D'Israeli, who've collaborated on a bunch of horror/history-inflected comics including Scarlet Traces, Stickleback and Kingdom of the Wicked. This collects their steampunk-ish 2003 serial about an enormous, cursed ship, along with three brief sequels from the following few years. Could its American release be timed to the Titanic anniversary? Could be! (On the Midtown Comics list, not the Diamond Comics Distributors list.)

^ % NEW AVENGERS #25
This week's serving of Brian Michael Bendis-written AvX tie-in, drawn by Mike Deodato. Also this week in the Bendis department: Moon Knight #12, which I believe is the final issue, drawn by Alex Maleev. As I understand, the plan was for Bendis and Maleev's Scarlet to continue to appear bimonthly while Moon Knight appeared monthly; it appears that no issues of Scarlet actually made it out during Moon Knight's run.

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - April 18, 2012: The War of Fog

Douglas Wolk — 2012-04-17T14:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
* Arms and armor
^ Crusty Bunkers
% The world before us

* % 3 STORY: SECRET FILES OF THE GIANT MAN
This is the ramp-up for the Era of Matt Kindt Doing a Whole Lot: a saddle-stitched collection of three brief sequels (which originally appeared online) to his 2009 graphic novel about a giant secret agent. Next month, his new ongoing series Mind MGMT launches, and he'll be writing Frankenstein at DC starting in June. Kindt likes his secret-agent stories.

* % AMAZING SPIDER-MAN OMNIBUS VOL. 2
A $100 hardcover collecting the first few years' worth of the Stan Lee/John Romita period: #39-67, plus Annuals #3-5, the two issues of the Spectacular Spider-Man magazine, and a set of Not Brand Ecch stories. I love that Romita didn't really bother to try to make a subtle transition from the Steve Ditko period--he just whisked straight off in his own direction, "tiger/jackpot" and all.

^ % AVENGERS #25
An AvX tie-in by Brian Michael Bendis and Walter Simonson, whose presence on this arc makes me particularly psyched about it. Simonson also apparently writes (but doesn't draw) a story in Rocketeer Adventures 2 #2 this week, and Bendis and Mark Bagley's "Death of Spider-Man" sequence from Ultimate Spider-Man #156-160 is collected in paperback.

* % CASTLE WAITING VOL. 3 #16
Cue the "they don't call it that for nothing" jokes. Linda Medley puts out an issue of this relaxed, good-natured fantasy series when she feels like it and not a minute before--#15 came out around three years ago, and then there was the odd kerfuffle with the second collection having her name appear only on a removable sticker on the cover. I'll read it whenever she releases one into the world, though.

^ DARK HORSE PRESENTS #11
Another chapter of Carla Speed McNeil's Finder serial "Third World," plus work by Francesco Francavilla, Evan Dorkin, Neal Adams and others.

% E.C. SEGAR'S POPEYE, VOL. 6: ME LI'L SWEE'PEA
The final year-or-so worth of E.C. Segar's run on "Thimble Theatre" is collected in another big, punchy hardcover, wrapping up the Fantagraphics reprint series. (On the Midtown Comics list, not the Diamond Comic Distributors list.)

* INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #515
Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca appear to be setting up James Rhodes for some kind of fall. Also in the Fraction department this week, Defenders #5 is drawn by Mitch Breitweiser. Marvel's teasing a new series, possibly Hawkeye, by Fraction and David Aja, too; I'm happy to see them re-teamed, but is that going to be on top of Iron Man, Thor, Defenders and occasional bursts of Casanova?

% KRAZY & IGNATZ 1922-1924 AT LAST MY DRIM OF LOVE HAS COME TRUE
This is the week for Fantagraphics finishing up ambitious reprint projects, apparently. Their final Chris Ware-designed collection of George Herriman's black-and-white Sunday "Krazy Kat" strips is augmented by ten extra color Krazys that appeared in 1924, as well as the entire run of two other strips, 1903's "Mrs. Waitaminnit" and 1926's "Us Husbands." Also this week: a fancy hardcover compiling the three volumes of 1916-1924 Sundays. "Stumble Inn" is the next Herriman project up for the Fantagraphics treatment; I'm hoping they (or somebody) tackle the complete "Krazy" dailies at some point.

* % THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS #2
Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra's (very) alternate history of twentieth-century science introduces Wernher von Braun, about whom Tom Lehrer wrote one of the greatest rhyming couplets ever: "'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?/That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun." Also out: a second printing of the first issue.

* PROPHET #24
I would not have guessed that a 2012 revival of an early-'90s Rob Liefeld series would be this interesting (or this unlike what one thinks of as a Liefeld comic), but I reckoned without the mighty skills of writer Brandon Graham. And this issue's drawn by Farel Dalrymple, which is always an insta-buy signal for me.

* PUNISHER #10
Greg Rucka and Matthew Clark continue the "Omega Effect" crossover with Avenging Spider-Man and Daredevil.

% RESET #1
A new Peter Bagge miniseries with a premise that can't help but be compared to Groundhog Day: a man has to go back and relive his adult life in a virtual environment, but can go back and start over with one particularly humiliating moment any time he wants. It's curious that Bagge himself keeps returning to the lasting effects of awkward adolescence in his work.

% THE SHARK KING
R. Kikuo Johnson has been keeping a pretty low profile since the 2005 release of Night Fisher--mostly just occasional short pieces here and there (he drew the spot illustrations of people wearing hoodies that appeared in The New Yorker last week). This short fable, one of TOON Books' hardcovers for young readers, is the first book he's published since then. It looks really good, of course.

* SHOOTERS
Brandon Jerwa, Eric Trautmann and Steve Lieber's hardcover graphic novel concerns a military contractor dealing with both what happens in corporatized war and what happens after it.

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - April 11, 2012: That Which Remains Concealed

Douglas Wolk — 2012-04-10T12:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
* Continuity implants
^ Stars and/or garters
% What lies beneath

^ % UNTERZAKHN
The wonderful Leela Corman's long-in-the-works graphic novel, which was appropriately enough serialized in the Forward, concerns two sisters growing up in the Jewish community on the Lower East Side in the early 1900s, and how incidents from their childhood echo in their adult life. Despite what a certain amount of Unterzakhn's press has been suggesting, it's not her "debut"--Queen's Day came out in 2000, Subway Series in 2002--but it's been way too long since there's been a new full-length book by her.* ^ % 2000 A.D. #1772-1775
Ah, I see we're finally catching up. The five-stories-a-week lineup is shifting rapidly in these issues--the only holdovers from the previous batch are John Wagner, Ben Willsher and Henry Flint's ultra-taut Judge Dredd serial "Day of Chaos: Eve of Destruction" (which is starting to echo elements of Grant Morrison's "Inferno") and Robbie Morrison starting to wrap up his long-running Nikolai Dante series with artists Simon Fraser and John Burns. #1772 reintroduces Alec Worley and Jon Davis-Hunt's urban fantasy Age of the Wolf, #1774 features Pat Mills and James McKay's revival of the early-2KAD dinosaurs-eating-people series Flesh, and #1775 launches Brendan McCarthy and Al Ewing's long-anticipated psychedelic freakout The Zaucer of Zilk. Also this week: Judge Dredd Megazine #321 (whose new material is augmented by reprints of the early-2KAD serials "Death Planet" and "Angel"), as well as Judge Anderson: The Psi Files Vol. 2, reprinting some particularly gorgeous-looking stories drawn by the likes of Kev Walker, Arthur Ranson and Steve Sampson. (I wrote about it here.) All of these are on the Midtown list, not the Diamond list.

% ALABASTER: WOLVES #1
The first of a five-issue sixteen-year-old-girl-as-monster-killer miniseries, written by Caitlín R. Kiernan (and taking off from her Dancy Flammarion stories), and drawn by Steve Lieber. As I understand, Alabaster is intended as an ongoing project, on the Hellboy "series of minis" plan.

% AVENGING SPIDER-MAN #6
Maybe the point of this series is to be the designated Spider-Man crossover title. Mark Waid and Greg Rucka (half of the 52 team!) are collaborating to write "The Omega Effect," a three-part crossover with Waid's Daredevil and Rucka's Punisher that begins here. Marco Checchetto draws.

* ^ BATMAN INC. DELUXE EDITION VOL. 1
Grant Morrison's Batman-as-corporation series had a very rocky first year: schedule bumps all over the place, at least a couple of issues that appeared to have switched their order at the last minute, and the late-out-the-gate Leviathan Strikes! special that condensed a lot of material that was supposed to have run before the New 52 reboot. (Having the entire universe reworked in the middle of an extended serial might have been a problem too.) But it also had high entertainment value, occasionally splendid artwork, and Morrison pushing his writing in a few new directions. This hardcover collects the whole run to date for $30, in anticipation of next month's relaunch. Also this week in the Bat-franchise: artist Amy Reeder's final issue of Batwoman, #8, written by J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman.

^ HITMAN VOL. 6: FOR TOMORROW
The reprint program for Garth Ennis and John McCrea's late '90s-early '00s spot of troublemaking in the DCU has sped up--this one covers #37-50, in which (among other things) Tommy Monaghan tangles with dinosaurs in what has to have been a homage to Flesh. The next one should be able to wrap up the series; maybe it'll even throw in JLA/Hitman?

^ % JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #636
Kieron Gillen and Richard Elson conclude the "Terrorism Myth" sequence of their Loki series; the recap page this time is narrated by a Cthulhu-esque Elder God.

* ^ NEW AVENGERS #24
Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato begin their AvX tie-in. Also this week: Bendis and Mark Bagley's Avengers Assemble #2. On top of that, there's Essential Avengers vol. 8, a fat $20 black-and-white paperback that reprints #164-#184, a 1977-1979 sequence with art by John Byrne, George Pérez and others, as well as the 1977 Avengers and Marvel Two-In-One annuals in which Jim Starlin wrapped up his Warlock/Magus sequence. And in further AvX- and Byrne-related news, this week sees the paperback edition of the expanded version of X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga, the Chris Claremont/ Byrne sequence from 1980 with which these franchises are still trying to grapple more than 30 years later.

% SECRET #1
The launch of a new ongoing Image series by Jonathan Hickman and Ryan Bodenheim. I'm happy to see Hickman forcefully moving back into titles he's created.

^ SHOWCASE PRESENTS THE LOSERS
Robert Kanigher and a host of artists worked on this early-'70s series that teamed up a bunch of lesser DC war-comics characters: no relation, other than the name, to the recent Andy Diggle/Jock project. The issues reprinted here (G.I. Combat #138 and Our Fighting Forces #123-150) feature some particularly excellent Joe Kubert cover designs--see, for instance, this one or this one or this one or this one.

* % UNTOLD TALES OF SPIDER-MAN OMNIBUS
I always enjoyed Kurt Busiek and Pat Olliffe's kicky, bargain-priced, mid-'90s series, set between issues (and sometimes between panels) of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's Spider-Man stories. (Back then, I wrote an enthusiastic review of it, from which a sentence appeared on the back cover of the paperback collection--and then, a few months later, an editorial note in Untold Tales' letter column apologized for quoting it. Long story.) This $100 hardcover--significantly more than it'd cost you to buy the original issues, although presumably on nicer-than-newsprint paper--includes the entire run, plus Amazing Fantasy #16-18, the Strange Encounter special, the 1996 and 1997 annuals (the former of which has some very sharp Mike Allred artwork), and Busiek and Olliffe's piece from 2010's Amazing Spider-Man Annual #37.

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - April 4, 2012: Hero of the Beach

Douglas Wolk — 2012-04-03T11:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
* The Paul Masson principle
^ Somebody's read some Moorcock
% Supertasters
¢ Claret and/or carrots

% DAREDEVIL #10.1
Mark Waid and Khoi Pham are the creators behind this "no, really, you can start reading it now" issue. That is one king hell of a Marcos Martin cover, too.* ^ ¢ 2000 AD #1770
Ah, here's the issue that went missing last week when the ones around it came out. Ben Willsher fills in for Henry Flint on the artwork for the Judge Dredd serial "Day of Chaos"; Nikolai Dante, Grey Area, Absalom and Strontium Dog are all still in mid-story.

* ^ ACTION COMICS #8
Grant Morrison and Rags Morales wrap up their initial "early days of Superman" sequence. At least this time we supposedly get 30 pages of their story for our $4.

¢ AVENGERS VS. X-MEN #1
In which Brian Michael Bendis and John Romita Jr. give the people what they want. Also this week in the Avengers department: the paperback collection of Jen Van Meter and Roger Robinson's sly, low-key Avengers: Hawkeye Solo. Also this week in the department of superhero comics about archers: Ann Nocenti and Harvey Tolibao's Green Arrow #8.

* ^ CASANOVA: AVARITIA #3
One day shy of six months after #2, Matt Fraction and Gabriel Bá's densely packed miniseries returns. I really like that little Prisoner homage Fraction posted as a preview.

* % ¢ DROPS OF GOD VOL. 3
Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimoto's wine manga rolls onward.

* ^ FLEX MENTALLO: MAN OF MUSCLE MYSTERY DELUXE EDITION
The wonderful mid-'90s Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely miniseries that spun out of Doom Patrol is collected after years of rumors and reschedulings. (It's also been recolored, and apparently has some extra sketchbook-type material thrown into the package). I went back and reread this last year, after not having seen it for a long time, and was fascinated to see how much of Morrison's subsequent work was here in germinal form--Supergods, in particular, really seems like Flex Mentallo from a very slightly different angle.

¢ GLAMOURPUSS #24
That's right: Dave Sim has been doing this series for almost four years. Its overall artistic progress has arguably been rather less than than we saw in any given four-year span of Cerebus, but you also can't accuse him of failing to follow his own path.

¢ iZOMBIE #24
Chris Roberson and Mike Allred's series continues with rock 'n' roll, "dead presidents" and undead secret agents. They've just announced that #28 will be the final issue--I'm sorry to see it go, and curious to see what both of them cook up next.

¢ JEREMIAH OMNIBUS VOL. 1
In which Dark Horse takes yet another stab at publishing an American edition of Hermann's long-running Belgian comics series (31 volumes to date, from 1979 to the present). This omnibus format is going to cover three European volumes in each American one, starting from the beginning--Dark Horse previously tried jumping in with volume 22, about ten years ago. Other abortive attempts to publish it here were made by Fantagraphics, Catalan and Malibu.

% ¢ MR. TOAST COMICS #1 and #2
Dan Goodsell's adorable, slightly James Kochalka-esque toy/illustration creation comes to comics form, with stories by Goodsell--who doubles as an expert in the history of food packaging targeted at children--and Todd Webb. (On the Midtown list, not the Diamond list.)

* ^ % SUPREME #63
I had somehow thought that Alan Moore had written another year's worth of unpublished Supreme scripts, but apparently there was only this one, which ends on a cliffhanger. Erik Larsen draws it, and takes over writing too as of next issue. Also this week: the paperback edition of Moore, Stephen Bissette, John Totleben et al.'s Saga of the Swamp Thing, Book One--perhaps with its production errors corrected this time? Cross your fingers.

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - March 28, 2012: Unearthing

Douglas Wolk — 2012-03-27T12:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
% Run the mission
^ Don't get seen
* See
¢ Swim away from the Mission

^ DAREDEVIL #10
Paolo Rivera draws the fantastic quasi-Dore cover, as well as the Mark Waid-written story inside, which wraps up the Mole Man sequence. I love the way this series keeps finding new ways to embrace the past thirty years of Daredevil while being completely unlike it.* THE BULLETPROOF COFFIN DISINTERRED #3
David Hine and Shaky Kane's miniseries about the kinds of feverish fantasies that are bred by cheap old comics bubbles onward. People with eyeballs for heads are always cool.

% THE FLASH #7
If all the New 52 titles were as elegantly executed as Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato's Flash, they'd be a lot easier to admire as a line. Manapul and Buccellato's take on the series isn't flashy or particularly interested in pushing it into new territory, but it's got real thought behind its tone and its aesthetics, and it's always a pleasure to look at. This issue involves Captain Cold, because that's who shows up in Flash comics.

* % ¢ 2000 AD #1769
The one issue of 2000 AD on which both the Diamond Comics Distribution and Midtown Comics shipping lists agree this week sees all five of the current serials (Judge Dredd, Absalom, Strontium Dog, Grey Area and Nikolai Dante) in mid-story. Diamond's list also includes #1771 (the 35th anniversary issue, which sports a pretty wonderful Chris Weston cover--"a love letter to the second Golden Age of 2000 AD"--and has the same five right-in-the-middle-of-things serials augmented by a couple of peculiar "what if"-type one-offs concerning former 2KAD characters Rogue Trooper and the Visible Man), but not #1770. How hard can it be to ship issues of a weekly series in order?

^ ¢ NEW AVENGERS #23
Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato wrap up the Dark Avengers storyline, at least for this iteration of the Dark Avengers. Also this week: Avengers #24.1, by Bendis and Brandon Peterson, and the inevitable Avengers Vs. X-Men #0, by Bendis, Jason Aaron and Frank Cho, as previewed in pretty much everything with a Marvel logo in the past month.

¢ ROGER LANGRIDGE'S SNARKED! #6
I keep pressing Langridge's all-ages post-Lewis Carroll adventure on people, and they keep reading a few pages and giggling out loud and then asking me where they can find copies. This episode of the current nautical storyline--in the manner of most Boom! books, I suspect the series will continue to break down in four-issue chunks--is called "Yo Ho Ho and a Nice Cup of Tea."

^ % SECRET AVENGERS VOL. 3: RUN THE MISSION, DON'T GET SEEN, SAVE THE WORLD
Warren Ellis's most recent venture into superhero-mainstream comics, a variation on the formula he tried out in Global Frequency, collected as a $25 hardcover: issues #16-21, respectively drawn by Jamie McKelvie, Kev Walker, David Aja, Michael Lark, Alex Maleev and Stuart Immonen. That Aja issue is nice.

¢ UNDERTOW
Ellen Lindner's thoughtful, scrappy graphic novel from a few years ago, concerning a young woman's weekend experiencing the darker side of both youth and Coney Island in the '50s, reappears in hardcover, from the new U.K. press Soaring Penguin. (On the Midtown list, not the Diamond list.)

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - March 21, 2012: He Didn't Think It Too Many

Douglas Wolk — 2012-03-20T13:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
* Different class
^ Separations
% Freaks

* ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN
This 1986-1987 Frank Miller/Bill Sienkiewicz miniseries might be the most visually impressive thing Marvel has published in the direct-market era--Sienkiewicz at the absolute peak of his form, a phenomenal he-do-the-police-in-different-voices act that constantly shifts its look between and within panels to register changes in perspective and psychological mood. It hasn't been available as a standalone volume in a long time, and there'll be a paperback version out this fall, but $25 gets you this hardcover edition. Sienkiewicz also draws a story in this week's Rocketeer Adventures 2 #1, keeping the Dave Stevens-created franchise going.* ^ % 2000 AD #1768
John Wagner and Henry Flint's Judge Dredd serial gets into scary bio-warfare territory; the penultimate Nikolai Dante storyline by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser approaches its conclusion; Absalom, Grey Area and Strontium Dog chug along. Also this week: Sláine: Books of Invasions, Vol. 1, a new American paperback reprinting a 2003 sequence of 2000 AD's long-running sword-and-sorcery feature written by Pat Mills and drawn in a bizarre photo-manipulated style by Clint Langley, and Judge Dredd Megazine #320, which includes Mills and Langley's new project "American Reaper," as well as an interview with artist Mick Austin and a chunk of reprinted Strontium Dog spinoffs from 1993 and 1994. (All are on the Diamond Comics Distribution list, not the Midtown Comics list.)

^ % AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #682
Dan Slott and Stefano Caselli reunite for "Ends of the Earth," a Sinister Six sequence that has somehow ended up with its own Diamond-shipping-list code. The premise (Doctor Octopus is dying and blackmailing superheroes into doing his bidding) seems to be pretty similar to that Iron Man storyline "Fix Me" from about a year ago. Speaking of which, Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca's Invincible Iron Man #514 is out this week, too.

* CARTOON MONARCH: OTTO SOGLOW AND THE LITTLE KING
I've heard about Soglow's whimsical silent comic strip "The Little King"--which began as a weekly feature in The New Yorker before it moved into newspapers--but never seen more than a few episodes, so I'm particularly excited to see this $50 IDW volume. Incidentally, those little drawings that punctuate the "Talk of the Town" section in The New Yorker are all Soglow's, although the artist died in 1975.

* DARK HORSE PRESENTS VOL. 2 #10
The big draw here as far as I'm concerned is the resumption of Carla Speed McNeil's color Finder serial "Third World," but this issue of the chunky monthly anthology also includes Evan Dorkin, Brian Wood, "Tarzan," and more.

% GARBAGE PAIL KIDS
If you've ever wondered how Art Spiegelman paid the bills in the mid-'80s while he was working on RAW and the first volume of Maus, now you know. (On the Midtown list, not the Diamond list.)

^ % THE SINCEREST FORM OF PARODY: THE BEST 1950S MAD-INSPIRED SATIRICAL COMICS
Before there were knockoffs of MAD-the-magazine like Cracked and Crazy--and I still love the fact that Cracked's parody of "Mad Max" was called "Cracked Max"--there were a whole lot of knockoffs of MAD-the-comic-book, like Whack, Nuts, Eh, Unsane... This John Benson-edited anthology collects work from a bunch of them. (On the Midtown list, not the Diamond list.)

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - March 14, 2012: I Was Happy When I Looked Like This

Douglas Wolk — 2012-03-13T13:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
* The realm of the quotidian
% The realm of the fantastical

* SHOWCASE PRESENTS YOUNG LOVE VOL. 1
Holy wedding dresses, this looks great, even in a week as full of excellent new and old material as this one. This collection includes Young Love #39-56 (earlier issues were published by Prize Comics), featuring a lot of artists who are probably better known for their superhero work but arguably had their heart more in this stuff--Gene Colan, John Romita, Mike Sekowsky, Don Heck... I mean, check the very first cover, from 1963. Or this one! Or, omigod, this one! Or this one!! Anyway, nurse Mary Robin, R.N., was the cover star most of the time during this period. Where's her new series, anyway?* % THE ART OF MOLLY CRABAPPLE, VOL. 1: WEEK IN HELL
Not quite comics: this is a whole bunch of photos, documenting the week Crabapple spent locked in a hotel room, covering 270 square feet of (paper on) its walls with her artwork. And it coincides with the Kickstarter Crabapple is currently running for her next big art project, "Shell Game."

% AVENGERS ASSEMBLE #1
Brian Michael Bendis launches his third simultaneous ongoing Avengers series, this one drawn by his Brilliant partner Mark Bagley and intended as an entry-level series for potential readers interested in the movie. Also this week: Avengers #24, written by Bendis and drawn as solicited by Daniel Acuña (despite the last few issues' fill-ins), which apparently wraps up the Norman Osborn plotline, and addresses the question of "Which Avengers will take their relationship to the next level?" Or, rather, "Which Avengers Will Take Their Relationship To The Next Level?" Oh, Marvel, you don't get to charge more if you capitalize more letters.

% BATWOMAN #7
Last month's issue of this J.H. Williams III/W. Haden Blackman-written series--the first to be drawn by alternating-arc artist Amy Reeder--was "so different from the first five issues it seemed like a whole different comic," a friend of mine told me. It's still pretty terrific, although the "creative differences" that resulted in Reeder leaving after #9 have me wondering where this might be going.

* CORTO MALTESE, VOL. 1: THE BALLAD OF THE SALT SEA
People keep telling me how great this Hugo Pratt series is. This first volume was originally published in 1967.

* CRIME DOES NOT PAY ARCHIVES, VOL. 1
Pre-Comics Code extreme nastiness in this $50 hardcover from Dark Horse, following last fall's sampler paperback. Matt Fraction writes the introduction.

% DC UNIVERSE BY ALAN MOORE
Reissue! Repackage! Repackage! Re-evaluate the comics! This $40 hardcover is not to be confused with its earlier iterations, DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore and Across the Universe: The DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore. It apparently still contains both "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" and The Killing Joke--I hope this time someone will have fixed the production errors that mangled an earlier edition's version of the former. The new collection is the longest variation on this project yet, now incorporating the miniseries Voodoo and Deathblow: Byblows, since those characters have recently been gerrymandered into the DCU.

* HEROIC: A WOMANTHOLOGY
$50 is the cover price for this oddly limited anthology, whose finances are a little head-scratchable. The creators list, though, includes Ann Nocenti, Colleen Doran, Gail Simone, Trina Robbins, etc. Worth a look, anyway.

% JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #635
The Kieron Gillen/Mitch Breitweiser riff on mythology continues with Nightmare, Son of Satan, and serpents that look a lot like the cover of the Vince Clarke/Martin Gore album. Also this week: Journey Into Mystery: Fear Itself: Fallout, a hardcover collecting #626.1 and #627-631.

* NANCY IS HAPPY: COMPLETE DAILIES 1943-1945
A big fat square brick of Ernie Bushmiller's poker-faced masterwork. Fantagraphics has had this on the schedule for eons; good to see it finally coming out!

* % SAGA #1
The first issue of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' new ongoing sci-fi/fantasy series from Image offers 44 pages of story for $3. From what I've seen of it, it's page-turner-y in the familiar Vaughan manner, although it has one odd tic that sometimes turns up in SF/F and dings the mood for me: presenting particular cultural artifacts of the writer's culture and its present moment in different-era-and-galaxy situations, as if they're simply universals of existence.

% SAMMY THE MOUSE
Zak Sally's three-issue Ignatz project, collected at a smaller size and printed on Sally's own offset press.

* % SAUCER COUNTRY #1
Paul Cornell and Ryan Kelly launch a new Vertigo ongoing series about Presidential electoral politics and alien abduction.

* SECRETS BEHIND THE COMICS
A $20 reprint (from Pure Imagination) of a $1 book (from 1947) by Stan Lee--part how-to, part biographical information on cartoonists of the time.

* % THE SUNDAY FUNNIES COLLECTED, VOL. 1
In which Russ Cochran keeps his hand in comics reprints. This is $30 for three issues totaling 96 pages, which is a little spendy, even though it's color printing the size of old tabloids--22 x 16 inches, folded over. The lineup looks impressive, though: Sunday strips from 1895 through 1934, including Frank King's "Gasoline Alley," Hal Foster's "Tarzan," various Lyonel Feininger things, George Herriman represented by both "Krazy Kat" and "Stumble Inn," etc., scanned from the Bill Blackbeard collection at Ohio State.

% UNWRITTEN #35
I confess I'm behind on this Mike Carey-et-al. series, but good Lord (choke), that is one gorgeous cover (by Yuko Shimizu). This wraps up the "Tommy Taylor and the War of Words" storyline.

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - March 7, 2012: Blanket Recovery

Douglas Wolk — 2012-03-06T12:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
* Post-manga
^ The beloved entertainer
% Schools
¢ Specific urban setting is very important

* % FRIENDS WITH BOYS
Faith Erin Hicks' 200-page webcomic about a home-schooled teenager facing her first day of public school is still online--but only through today, since tomorrow it gets replaced by this print edition. File under: the generation of North American cartoonists who grew up on manga and are eventually going to take over the world.

^ ¢ 2000 A.D. #1766
All five serials are in mid-story in this one, but I'm particularly enjoying John Wagner and Henry Flint's densely packed, text-heavy Judge Dredd story "Day of Chaos: Eve of Destruction," which this issue loops in some plot threads from last year's Megazine serial "Hot Night in 95." First-page line of dialogue that cracked me up: "Address me as Mr. Womanly. I say nothing until I speak to my lawyer." (On the Diamond list, not the Midtown list.)

^ ¢ ACTION COMICS #7
Grant Morrison and Rags Morales pick up their Superman story where they left off in #4. I'm used to Morrison looking like he doesn't have anything like a master plan until it turns out he's had one all along, but sometimes I wish he'd show his hand a little more.

% THE COMPLETE CRUMB COMICS VOL. 1: THE EARLY YEARS OF BITTER STRUGGLE
This new edition of the first book in Fantagraphics' 17-volume series, covering the 1958-1962 period, is expanded to include a newly rediscovered 48-page work from 1962. Also, this volume's subtitle is one of the gags I've poached most often in my life. (On the Midtown list, not the Diamond list.)

^ % THE COMPLETE PEANUTS VOL. 17
Speaking of long-running Fantagraphics series, this volume covers 1983-1984, the period when Charles Schulz started to think Spike was much funnier than everyone else thought he was. Schulz was still brilliant, though: has anyone ever nailed the addiction/recovery/self-righteousness cycle as succinctly as this 1983 strip? Leonard Maltin writes the introduction, Franklin's on the cover. (On the Midtown list, not the Diamond list.)

¢ DEFENDERS #4
Matt Fraction and Terry Dodson's update of the tone, sweep and formal devices of Marvel 1972 to a present-day cut-and-style is, among other things, the closest thing we've got right now to a Dr. Strange series.

¢ GREEN ARROW #7
It's been a very long time since Ann Nocenti's been the regular writer of an ongoing series--I think it's been since Kid Eternity in 1994--but she takes over this issue, with artist Harvey Tolibao. I'm very curious to see what she does with it.

¢ iZOMBIE #23
Chris Roberson and Mike Allred's monsters-a-go-go series is consistently nice-looking, and this issue's got one gorgeous cover--I especially like the brainburgers in the background.

* ¢ KING CITY
Brandon Graham's charming, incredibly odd, heavy-on-the-worldbuilding series about a Catmaster (a little bit like a Green Lantern, but with cats instead of green light), has had a long, messy tumble through publication formats, but it's finally collected in a single volume.

^ ¢ THE SMURF OLYMPICS
To date myself a little, when this Peyo/Yvan Delporte volume was first serialized, the U.S. had just pulled out of the Moscow Summer Olympics, and my elementary school gym teacher, who had been tapped for the U.S. track team, was hellaciously annoyed about it. This edition is cannily timed to the London games. (On the Midtown list, not the Diamond list.)

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Don't Ask! Just Buy It! - February 29, 2012: Fifth Week Non-Event

Douglas Wolk — 2012-02-28T14:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Don't Ask! Just Buy It!, Opinion

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY:
* Adjective begins title
^ Adjective does not modify anything

* NEW AVENGERS #22
Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato bring us more New vs. Dark Avengers fighty-fight action, and if you suspect we just got one of these two weeks ago, we did. You can look at that in a few possible ways. One is that New Avengers is scrambling to catch up before it has to fall into lockstep with a bunch of other titles when Avengers vs. X-Men launches a month from now. Another is that, now that both Marvel and DC are getting much better at shipping everything on schedule--well, everything except some of Bendis's titles, Icon material, and Justice League, which just happens to be by the two DC creators who are probably exempt from the "no, seriously, it needs to ship on time" rule--mainstream comics have developed a small outbreak of their old fifth-week problem. Back in the early '80s, if there were five release dates in a given month, almost nothing would come out the fifth week. In the late '90s and early 2000s, there were often special events (clusters of linked one-shots, etc.) scheduled for those weeks, and the four monthly Superman series were augmented by a fifth, quarterly series, Superman: The Man of Tomorrow, just to make sure there was a new Superman comic every week. That kind of practice seems to have been forgotten with the loosy-goosey release dates of recent years. Considering this week's relatively slim pickings, it might be time to resume it.

* AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #680
Speaking of extra issues, Dan Slott and Humberto Ramos squeeze in this month's third issue of Amazing (counting the .1 from a couple weeks back)--this one involves Spider-Man in space, which is a really weird thing in theory, but technically he's been doing it since #1.

^ BATMAN BEYOND UNLIMITED #1
So that's where the wonderful Dustin Nguyen has been keeping himself: he's drawing the Justice League Beyond material in here! And the Batman story's drawn by Norm Breyfogle, who's also been keeping a low profile in superhero comics other than his reunion with Alan Grant for that Batman Retroactive one-shot a little while ago.

* EMPOWERED DELUXE EDITION VOL. 1
People I respect keep telling me how much fun Adam Warren's superhero parody series is; this package is one way of catching up for people with sixty bucks burning a hole in their pocket, a collection of the first three volumes and some other material as a 700-page hardcover.

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Gilbert Hernandez's 'Birdland' Offers Alliteration, Transfiguration, Penetration [Sex]

Douglas Wolk — 2012-02-27T13:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Marvel, Opinion

Gilbert Hernandez's comics, from his work in Love and Rockets to standalone volumes like last year's Love from the Shadows, have often included some pretty intense sexual content. But he's only ever released one project that qualifies as full-on pornography: Birdland, a three-issue miniseries from 1990-1991 and a one-shot sequel from 1994, later collected as a single volume. Birdland has been out of print for a while, which is a pity. It's witty, eccentric, bursting with joy, and utterly, cheerfully smutty.

As often happens in Hernandez's stories, the basic setup is a complicated chain of frustrated and sublimated desires, although in this one everyone's sublimating them by getting it on. The stripping team of Bang Bang and Inez (who'd previously appeared briefly in early issues of Love and Rockets) are both carrying on secret affairs with sexually inexhaustible lawyer Mark Herrera.

Every woman seems to desire Mark, except for his wife, Fritz, a psychotherapist who has sex with her patients while they're under her hypnotic spell. Fritz's sister Petra unrequitedly lusts after Mark, too, but she's been carrying on a years-long affair with Mark's brother Simon, who in turn is erotically fixated on Fritz and, specifically, her lisp, although he's also sleeping with Inez. And so on. Eventually, the aliens who abducted Bang Bang as a child get involved, and transport the whole cast up to their ship for a pansexual orgy.

Then things get weird, or weirder.Almost the entire cast undergoes a gender reversal, and Fritz breaks the fourth wall to attempt to hypnotize the reader. That's followed by a handful of wordless dream sequences involving versions of the cast members in X-rated prehistoric, Western and sci-fi scenarios (the first includes some hot dinosaur love) before we get to the comedy-of-remarriage denouement. And the whole thing is drawn in a style that's the erotic equivalent of Jack Kirby's fight scenes: grounded in the way actual bodies interact, but pumped up to an imaginative intensity way beyond anything the naked eye has ever seen.

On top of that, Birdland is funny--not corny-funny or nudge/wink-funny, but absurd and sly, with a terrific sense for what can make the overfamiliar language of pornography fresh again. In one soap-operatic scene, Petra's saying "B-but I can give you all the love you need, Mark; you're wasting your time waiting for Fritz to come around," and thinking "Oh, shut up and ransack my rapacious rectum with your reputedly tireless tongue, you gorgeous geek!" Dialogue in another panel: "Ah-ah-acmesthesia!" "Oh-oh-ontogeny!"

Yes, this is the kind of porn that requires a dictionary to catch everything that's going on. A few years ago, Marc Sobel convincingly argued in a multi-part essay that Birdland is a satire of Wilhelm Reich and his theories about sexuality and "orgone energy," by way of Patti Smith's song "Birdland" -- the story never mentions Reich outright, but the connections are everywhere -- and that it's full of other subtleties for the careful reader. (The bodily-fluid sound effects in one of the final scenes, Sobel points out, are all Spanish words relating to the story of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste.) It's not often that a story pretends to be nothing but stroke material but is actually a bit deeper than that.

Hernandez has returned to a lot of Birdland's characters over the years, in very different contexts. Buff, tireless Mark Herrera eventually becomes a failed motivational speaker with an awful ponytail and a string of ex-wives. Petra's gotten older and had a daughter, whose G-rated exploits will be collected in The Adventures of Venus later this year. Fritz has become the central figure in a lot of Hernandez's more recent work, especially High Soft Lisp, in which the ways she appeases her sexual drives are much grimmer.

Another suggestion of Birdland's title, though, is that it happens in a kind of protected utopian zone, where everyone's youthful and beautiful and up for more, and sex is always a source of happiness for everyone involved, even when it's psychologically fraught for one reason or another. Every character in it ultimately gets a happy ending, both euphemistic and literal.

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