Sunday, January 31, 2016

New Comics For Wednesday 3rd of February





What what?!? Welcome to Feb folks! After your neck snaps back in place from the speed of January flying by lets have at this week New Comic List. Oh, wait...does that mean our birthday is coming up soon too?! More on that later in the week!

The Deadpool movie is nearly here, so close you can almost already see it in your mind but until it's release get your Pool fill with the latest mini, DEADPOOL MERCS FOR MONEY #1. Also if you were that kid asking for a PG-13 Deadpool flick here is the comic for you, MARVEL UNIVERSE DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE DIGEST TP. Miles Morales is hands down the single best thing to happen to Spider-Man in years, celebrate him joining the regular MU with Bendis and Pichelli on SPIDER-MAN #1. Beautiful pastel colours, stunning art in a odd surreal setting with story by Emma Rios, MIRROR #1 is definitely looking good. What happens when anthropomorphic characters are sent to the darkness of their prison system and can't deal with the harshness of their new surroundings? They break out into song is what, the only way to get through the day in KENNEL BLOCK BLUES #1. With new episodes of this long cancelled cartoon, replace that Gir shaped hole in your heart with the excellent, INVADER ZIM TP VOL 01. A stunning indie release, MEAN GIRLS CLUB ONE SHOT is just that, a gang of girls that are very, VERY mean! Skottie Young fans can get their fill of cute Marvel madness in the collection, GIANT SIZE LITTLE MARVEL AVX HC. And if Marvel isn't your think but you are still keen keen for some super cuteness try Dustin Nguyen's from Descender doing pre-teen DC's Trinity dealing with the dramas of grade school in SECRET HERO SOCIETY HC VOL 01 STUDY HALL OF JUSTICE. More oddness from the self proclaiming manga classic, JOJOS BIZARRE ADV BATTLE TENDENCY HC VOL 02MANIFEST DESTINY TP VOL 03 following the continuing exploits of the troubled discovery expedition of the New World with the most horrific trek yet. Music Super Gods deicide mystery continues with Gillen and McKelvie's hit WICKED & DIVINE TP VOL 03. Friendship and fighting woodland fiends is always in fashion with the latest collection of the runaway hit series, LUMBERJANES TP VOL 03.

Spot something here you just got to have? Just let us know and we'll get you sorted.

MARVEL
A-FORCE #2
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #7
CAPTAIN AMERICA SAM WILSON #6
CAPTAIN MARVEL #2
CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS #5
DEADPOOL MERCS FOR MONEY #1 (OF 5)
DOCTOR STRANGE #5
GUARDIANS OF INFINITY #3
HOWARD THE DUCK #4
INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #6
NOVA #4
OBI-WAN AND ANAKIN #2 (OF 5)
ROCKET RACCOON AND GROOT #2
SCARLET WITCH #3
SPIDER-MAN #1
SPIDEY #3
UNCANNY AVENGERS #5
UNCANNY X-MEN #3
VISION #4

DC COMICS
ACTION COMICS #49 NEAL ADAMS VAR ED
BATGIRL #48
BATMAN AND ROBIN ETERNAL #18
BATMAN BEYOND #9
BATMAN EUROPA #4 (OF 4)
DETECTIVE COMICS #49 NEAL ADAMS VAR ED
GREEN ARROW #49 NEAL ADAMS VAR ED
GREEN LANTERN #49 NEAL ADAMS VAR ED
MIDNIGHTER #9
SWAMP THING #2 (OF 6)
WE ARE ROBIN #8

VERTIGO
SHERIFF OF BABYLON #3 (OF 8)
SURVIVORS CLUB #5
UNFOLLOW #4

BOOM
GIANT DAYS #11
KENNEL BLOCK BLUES #1
KLAUS #3
TOIL & TROUBLE #6 (OF 6)
WOODS #20

DARK HORSE
ANGEL AND FAITH SEASON 10 #23
BARB WIRE #8
JOE GOLEM OCCULT DETECTIVE #4
LARA CROFT FROZEN OMEN #5 (OF 5)
LONE WOLF 2100 #2 (OF 4)
MYSTERY GIRL #3

DYNAMITE
BOBS BURGERS ONGOING #8
TRAIN CALLED LOVE #5 (OF 10)
VOLTRON FROM THE ASHES #5 (OF 6)

IDW
AMAZING FOREST #2
DONALD DUCK #10
EIGHTH SEAL #3 (OF 5)
JEM & THE HOLOGRAMS #11
MY LITTLE PONY FRIENDS FOREVER #25
UNCLE SCROOGE #11
VICTORIE CITY #2 (OF 4)
WALT DISNEY COMICS & STORIES #728

IMAGE
MIRROR #1
NAILBITER #20
PAPER GIRLS #5
PRETTY DEADLY #8
SAINTS #5
SHUTTER #18
SPAWN #260
VELVET #13
WALKING DEAD #151

ONI
EXODUS LIFE AFTER #3
RICK & MORTY #10

VALIANT
X-O MANOWAR #44

MISC
CODE PRU #2
GRANT MORRISONS 18 DAYS #8
JOHNNY RED #4 (OF 8)
MEAN GIRLS CLUB ONE SHOT
MERCURY HEAT #7 (MR)
PEEK THE FIRST (ONE SHOT) #1
PRINCELESS RAVEN PIRATE PRINCESS #5
PROVIDENCE #7 (OF 12)
REPLICA #3 (MR)
WAR STORIES #16

TRADES
ADVENTURE TIME SUGARY SHORTS TP VOL 02
AMERICAN BORN CHINESE SC
ANYAS GHOST GN
ART CAMILLA DERRICO HC VOL 03 RAINBOW CHILDREN
AVENGERS BY JONATHAN HICKMAN HC VOL 03
BABY SITTERS CLUB COLOR ED GN VOL 04 CLAUDIA  & ME
BATMAN ARKHAM SCARECROW TP
BEVERLY GN (MR)
BIZARRO TP
BUNNY VS MONKEY GN
CLIVE BARKERS NIGHTBREED TP VOL 02
CONAN TP VOL 18 DAMNED HORDE
DAREDEVIL BY MARK WAID HC VOL 04
DMC GN #2
DRAGONS RIDERS OF BERK COLLECTION TP VOL 01
FUTURE SHOCK ZERO GN
GIANT SIZE LITTLE MARVEL AVX HC
GRUMPY CAT HC VOL 01
HERO CATS TP VOL 03
HINGES TP BOOK 02 PAPER TIGERS
IDENTITY CRISIS TP NEW EDITION
INVADER ZIM TP VOL 01
JLA GODS AND MONSTERS HC
JOJOS BIZARRE ADV BATTLE TENDENCY HC VOL 02
JUDGE DREDD DAILY DREDDS HC VOL 01
LADY RAWHIDE LADY ZORRO TP
LAIKA SC NEW PTG
LUMBERJANES TP VOL 03
MANHATTAN PROJECTS HC VOL 02
MANIFEST DESTINY TP VOL 03
MARVEL UNIVERSE DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE DIGEST TP
MONSTER TP VOL 07 PERFECT ED URASAWA
MOVIE POSTERS REIMAGINED ALTERNATIVE DESIGNS CULT
NEW SUICIDE SQUAD TP VOL 02 MONSTERS
OXYMORON LOVELIEST NIGHTMARE TP
PREZ TP VOL 01 CORNDOG IN CHIEF
RED SONJA CONAN BLOOD OF A GOD HC
REGULAR SHOW TP VOL 05
SECRET HERO SOCIETY HC VOL 01 STUDY HALL OF JUSTICE
SHERLOCK HOLMES CRIME ALLEYS HC
SIDEKICK TP VOL 02
SKYDOLL DECADE GN
SLAINE BRUTANIA CHRONICLES HC VOL 02
SUPERIOR FOES SPIDER-MAN OMNIBUS HC
SWEATERWEATHER HC
TIPPING POINT HC
UNCANNY TP VOL 02
UNCANNY X-MEN HC VOL 01
WHERE IS JAKE ELLIS TP
WICKED & DIVINE TP VOL 03

BACK IN STOCK
ALL NEW ALL DIFFERENT AVENGERS #1
ALL NEW WOLVERINE #1
HELLBOY WINTER SPECIAL 2016 #1
GUARDIANS OF GALAXY #3 ART ADAMS 2ND PTG VAR
I HATE FAIRYLAND #1
I HATE FAIRYLAND #2
I HATE FAIRYLAND #3
I HATE FAIRYLAND #4
MS MARVEL #1

POISON IVY CYCLE OF LIFE AND DEATH #1 (OF 6)

Monday, January 25, 2016

ALL STAR RECOMMENDS FOR JANUARY 26TH


Hi.Thanks for tearing yourself away from your public holiday comics reading for a little bit. I’ll try to make it worth your while.

ITEM! Zainab Akhtar is back at it again, this time penning a two-part look ahead to comics 2016 that, frankly, makes mine of a few weeks back look pretty pedestrian. Among highlights I missed and had no idea about are works by the tremendous Dilraj Mann, Blutch and Michael DeForge.  Check out Part One here and Part Two here and keep a pen and paper handy. Zainab’s the best.

ITEM! Fans of reading book-books along with their comic-book cousins should think about picking up
David (John Dies at the End) Wong’s latest, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits.  It’s a funny and engaging, if slightly overlong, look at speculative technology and potential superhumanity. I’d give you a plot run-down, but why do that when I can quote from page 361 instead?

“The guy was wearing a camouflage outfit with knee pads, elbow pads, and bafflingly oversized shoulder pads.  The rest was a crisscross pattern of straps and bandoliers full of bullets. Everything else was pouches. So many pouches. His boots had pouches on them…The other four men seemed to be in competition to see who could fit the most pads, blades, and bullets onto their bodies while still remaining ambulatory. Yet none of them had helmets or any other kind of head or eye protection.”


What did that remind you of? Anything like this, perhaps??


Hmmm....

ITEM! The last two 2015 issues of Frontier arrived in my mail last week, with Becca Tobin and Michael DeForge and Becca Tobin handling issues 9 and 10 respectively. DeForge spins the tale of a former radical now working for a real estate developer who puts all of her urban insurgency skills to use infiltrating developing communities and ruining them from within for corporate profit. Tobin’s is the bizarre story of a musician who creates a sentient musical instrument from kitchen ingredients, nails and her own blood. Both are excellent and maintain the ridiculously high standard Frontier has set over the course of its run and with Eleanor Davis looking to kick off 2016s set of issues (as mentioned by Zainab), I’d say we’re in for another excellent year ahead from publishers Youth in Decline.




COMIC OF THE WEEK : FRANK IN THE 3RD DIMENSION 
By Jim Woodring& Charles Barnard 
Published By Fantagraphics 

If you’ve spent any length of time staring at Jim Woodring’s Frank comics and wondering why your brain seems to vibrate, you, like me, were pretty excited by the prospect of Frank in the 3rd Dimension. Well, the book has finally arrived and, incredibly, does not disappoint.

Frank, a “generic anthropomorph” who resembles something like Mickey Mouse reflected in a funhouse mirror, can be both cruel and kind, adventuring across a landscape of archetypes and monsters and critters both cute and grotesque in largely silent adventures and in the process tunnelling his way into bits of your brain you normally need sleep to access.

Along with his faithful “godling” companion, Pupling, Frank’s travels frequently beggar belief and defy description, rolling along with their own bizarre dreamy logic, as he faces down not only his foe Manhog but invasive creatures that alter his body in disturbing ways, alternate versions of himself and the demonic, crescent moon-headed Whim, who is always tempting and luring Frank into strange new places and states of being. Reading Frank is like experiencing the ultimate Cheese Dream, a crazed, cinematic unfurling of your subconscious that stunningly, beautifully throws all manner of contradictory information and imagery at you.

The Frank books are the most hypnotic comics ever made in my opinion, and Woodring has been justly lauded as a psychonaut of his own subconscious. Duncan Trussell has called him a “mystic” (and if you’ve never heard Trussell’s podcast with Woodring, you really must) and Neil Gaiman claims Frank will “re-arrange your consciousness.” It’s difficult for me to disagree with either opinion.

The stakes are raised in Frank in the 3rd Dimension, however, with Charles Barnard taking 32 Frank images and making, with between 200-400 layers per drawing according to his acknowledgments, some of the most eye-poppingly realised 3D I’ve ever seen. This is no gimmick, no Batman: Digital Justice or even the far more recent Crossed 3D, where people and objects seek to pop through two dimensional space clutching a badly-rendered Batarang or a fistful of entrails. With Frank in the 3rd Dimension, Barnard clearly seeks to bring the reader even further into Frank’s world, rather than have him emerge into ours. Forget how detailed it is, on that level alone it’s a success.

The gang’s all here – Frank, Fran, Pupling, Whim, Manhog – in moments of happiness or abject terror or just casually ripping holes in the sky to reveal the universe’s goopy entrails. The best pieces are obviously the most intricate, where the illusion of depth is at its fullest but each page is pretty incredible in its own right. A true labour of love by Barnard, the book also comes with its own groovy pair of Woodring-designed 3D glasses for you to wear during the long hours you may find yourself staring at its pages. The book’s a hit in my house, with Mrs Ashley making her way through Woodring’s visions with the kind of excited exclamation I haven’t heard since she finished reading Preacher.

Frank in the 3rd Dimension kicks comics 2016 off perfectly, so put down that triangle of mouldy stilton, strap those glasses on and get comfortable; this book is a shortcut to a grotesque but mesmerising virtual reality that’s destined to sit on your coffee table forever.



WEBCOMIC OF THE WEEK : SOME OTHER ANIMAL’S MEAT 

By Emily Carroll 

Emily Carroll releases a new webcomic and all is right with 2016 once more.

Stacey sells Alo Glo, an all-natural range of makeup and moisturising products at terrible Amway-style parties. If that’s not scary enough, she’s allergic to the products she endorses and is frequently repulsed by the human body, most obviously her own. Things take a turn towards the phantasmagorical as Carroll putting her own Gothic spin on body horror and Stacey begins to unravel.

Beautiful art and particularly striking lettering (those word balloons!) highlight “Some Other Animal’s Meat” with Carroll also once again doing new and interesting things with the space of your screen. An absolute treat.




COUNTDOWN TO MOZ METAL: HEAVY METAL JANUARY 1979

Happy New Year 1979! HM kicks this, the last year of the ‘70s, off excellently with the continuation of some old faves and the arrival of some new ones, gamely determined to continue bringing us impossibly high standards of reading pleasure. Chantelle Montellier’s “1996” returns (yay!) but none other than Trina Robbins also stops by this issue, turning in “Exercise In Gold” a lovely – and I mean *lovely* -- piece of work that pre-dates She-Ra: Princess of Power by seven years, yet somehow looks like the slightly fuzzy yet saturated Filmation-made cartoon anyhow.

A fierce warrior woman with golden hair and breastplate armour to match arrives at a seemingly deserted castle. Entering, she’s assaulted by all manner of harpies, serpents and “huge winged horrors.” Robbins’ captions are gloriously purple, simultaneously celebrating and sending up the often ridiculous fantasy cliché that has often been found in HM. Stumbling upon a handsome Christ-like prince, all gorgeous colour leaks from the page and as everything turns black and white, our heroine awakens, attached to a machine that creates dreams. Weeping, clearly tired of the drab, mechanised future future-life, she walks out to continue her sad existence. It’s a little, okay a lot, cliché, sure, but “Exercise in Gold” is just too full of beautiful, rich cartooning to be even remotely annoyed at its conclusion.

The flipside of “Exercise in Gold” is “Only Connect: The Tumor,” by Alias, in which the yearning for romanticism is replaced by a desire to extinguish all existential dilemma, hope and desire. A man has his brain removed and replaced with some cybernetic doohickey that “frees’” him from the “horrors”of life. A touch trite, but inoffensive at only two short pages and it likely made many a reader back in the day pause between bong hits in a moment of self reflection. Interesting that the female in “Exercise...”seeks escape through adventure and possible love while the man in “Only Connect...”seeks to annihilate all true trace of his self, huh? I’ll just leave that one to dangle there for you to pull at if you like.

Sergio Mercado returns with another chapter of “Telefield” which has been away for so long that I totally forgot about it despite digging Mercado’s space hippy adventures quite a bit. So our space hippies hit the city of Metropolis 5 to attend a “para psychic trip.” There they are accosted by street thugs and witness police brutality and ultra-violence by the “robot fuzz.” Never fear though, our space hippies arrive at their event, which features a kind of giant lava lamp connecting to the brains of all attending, creating a super-pleasurable “unified energy field.” I dunno. Sounds a bit nightmarish to me, but let’s turn the page and see. Oh, so “fantastic visions” unfold; a diaphanous, lightbulb-headed being plays an organ transmitting visions that flicker between the utopian and the horrific. Hitler with no pants! An orgy with a guy wearing terrifying clown makeup! I was right – this is terribly unpleasant, and indeed some sort of psychic trap by the organisers. What they are up to, I’ve no idea, but hopefully next issue we’ll find out...

Laseur’s “Station 34-728” continues the downer vibe as factory workers assemble huge robots which, at the very end of the production line, look like real life elephants. These robo-phants are sent out to “Darkest Africa Game Park” for hunting as, presumably, their real life counterparts are extinct.

Ouch.

“...Arabian Nights” continues, as does “Airtight Garage” and “So Beautiful and So Dangerous” and Druillet’s “Gail” concludes with all the nightmarish cosmic craziness you’d expect. Just as well really. I literally have run out of superlatives to heap upon Philippe Druillet, who even pastes in photos of himself and his late wife into this final cataclysmic chapter. We are even treated to double Bilal, who provides the continually lovely black and white art to “Exterminator 17” and also lush full colour art to a short, sharp, SF piece, “Ultimate Negotiations,” which he also scripts. Paul Kirchner’s “The Bus” also arrives, but we’ll get to that in due course.



COMICS VIDEO OF THE WEEK : FRYE TV GENIUS JIM WOODRING& VISIONS OF FRANK
To close this week, a pair of excellent Woodring-related videos. The first is two and a half minutes of Jim Woodring at work. The peek into his sketchbooks alone is reason enough to watch, but there’s a lot here in such a short viewing time. The second is a nine minute Frank animation that, if you’re an old man like me, might make you long for the days of MTV’s Liquid Television.

Genius Jim Woodring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7PizlF4Tk8

Visions of Frank: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brHZ69DsfQI

See you next week. Love your comics.


Cameron Ashley spends a lot of time writing comics and other things you’ll likely never read. He’s the chief editor and co-publisher of Crime Factory (www.thecrimefactory.com). You can reach him @cjamesashley on Twitter.

THE LAST WITCH HUNTER DVD GIVEAWAY!


From the producers of the 300 movie franchise, The Last Witch Hunter is an epic action-adventure starring Vin Diesel, Rose Leslie and Elijah Wood. Cursed with immortality by an evil witch queen, Kaulder (Diesel) has spent centuries hunting down rogue witches; vicious supernatural creatures intent on destroying humankind. Now, as the covens of modern day New York threaten to resurrect their queen and release a terrible plague on the world, Kaulder must face their vengeful wrath in a battle to save the human race.



Thanks to the Home Entertainment release of THE LAST WITCH HUNTER, AVAILABLE TO OWN ON DIGITAL JANUARY 27 AND ON DVD AND BLU-RAY FEBRUARY 3, we have 5 DVD's to give away!

To go into the draw for your chance to win all you need to do is tell us, "If you had to spend an eternity hunting Witches, which Witches from popular culture would make your Witches Hit List? "


Terms and Conditions:

Only entries made on the Facebook Page will be included in the draw, then entries will go into the All Star Barrel and winners will be drawn at random.

Entries close 6pm Tuesday 2nd of February and winners will be announced Wednesday the 3rd. Winners will be notified by Facebook as to when their prizes will be available to be collected. 

Winners must produce photo ID upon pick up. 

Prizes MUST be picked up no later than a week after the draw. 

Any remaining prizes after this date will be given away at our discretion to make sure they don't go to waste.


A huge thanks again to Entertainment One. THE LAST WITCH HUNTER , AVAILABLE TO OWN ON DIGITAL JANUARY 27 AND ON DVD AND BLU-RAY FEBRUARY 3!

Sunday, January 24, 2016

New Comics For Wednesday 27th of January



Back for a new year of comics, chats, friendships and fun, the latest Melbourne LGBT Comic Book Group and the All Star Women's Comic Book Club Meet Ups are happening this Tonight and Saturday and this month they are covering the same book, LUMBERJANES VOL 1 TP!

Tonight at the regular venue of Hares and Hyenas, the LGBT Group hosts it's January Meeting which you can find more out about HERE. While this Saturday will see the first ASWCC Meet for 2016 and the details you can find HERE.




If you haven't read this month's book but want to attend, don't stress and please come along. The groups are always excited to meet new members and are very welcoming! Now for this week's list!

What?! Only one new #1 title from Marvel this week?! Lemire is exploring a Wolvie fooled into killing the Xmen in his past which is a future that hasn't happened yet in the new OLD MAN LOGAN #1. Aquaman pals around with the Scooby Squad in SCOOBY DOO TEAM UP #14. How does a guy from Hell celebrate the festive season? Find out in HELLBOY WINTER SPECIAL 2016 #1. Discover where Marvel first took notice of little know writer at the time, Ed Brubaker with his work on the Dark Knight in BATMAN BY ED BRUBAKER TP VOL 01. New Publisher Aftershock seem to be doing pretty well with great creative teams and interesting new stories, this week STRAYER #1 from Justin Jordan sound like it might be for fans of Headlopper. BAKE SALE GN the tale of two cakes baking cakes and having a bake sale...oddly not a Grant Morrison title. A few run away hit collections from over the festive season are finally back in with HE-MAN & MASTERS OF UNIVERSE HC MINICOMIC, RICK & MORTY TP VOL 01, SPACE RIDERS TP VOL 01 VENGEFUL UNIVERSE and WE CAN NEVER GO HOME TPA classic and long out of print adventure of not one but TWO Black Widows in BLACK WIDOW ITSY BITSY SPIDER TPMercenary lycan changlings and supernatural special forces are the go in Simon Spurrier's new Image title, CRY HAVOC #1Covert ops and secret incursions are on the menu in Rucka and Lark's latest chapter, LAZARUS TP VOL 4 POISON. The closing chapter of super spy and secret agency series comes to rest in Matt Kindt's MIND MGMT HC VOL 06 THE IMMORTALS....There really seems to be a theme going here. AND a new PREVIEWS #329 FEBRUARY 2016 to check out the upcoming releases for April will also be available for you to look through.

And of course if you need our help to put aside anything else you might want, just let us know!

MARVEL
ALL NEW ALL DIFFERENT AVENGERS #4
ALL NEW HAWKEYE #3
ALL NEW INHUMANS #3
ANGELA QUEEN OF HEL #4
CARNAGE #4
DAREDEVIL #3
DEADPOOL AND CABLE SPLIT SECOND #2 (OF 3)
EXTRAORDINARY X-MEN #6
GUIDE TO MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE CA FIRST AVENGER
HOWLING COMMANDOS OF SHIELD #4
KANAN #10
MARVEL UNIVERSE ULT SPIDER-MAN SPIDER-VERSE #3 (OF 4)
MARVELS CAPTAIN AMERICA CIVIL WAR PRELUDE #4 (OF 4)
MOON GIRL AND DEVIL DINOSAUR #3
OLD MAN LOGAN #1
SPIDER-WOMAN #3
UNBEATABLE SQUIRREL GIRL #4
VENOM SPACE KNIGHT #3

DC COMICS
AQUAMAN #48 ADULT COLORING BOOK VAR ED
BATMAN AND ROBIN ETERNAL #17
BLACK CANARY #7
CYBORG #7 ADULT COLORING BOOK VAR ED
DEATHSTROKE #14 ADULT COLORING BOOK VAR ED
GRAYSON #16 ADULT COLORING BOOK VAR ED
HE MAN THE ETERNITY WAR #14
JUSTICE LEAGUE 3001 #8
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #7 ADULT COLORING BOOK VAR ED
OMEGA MEN #8
SCOOBY DOO TEAM UP #14
SUICIDE SQUAD MOST WANTED DEADSHOT KATANA #1 (OF 6)
SUPERMAN #48 ADULT COLORING BOOK VAR ED
SUPERMAN LOIS AND CLARK #4 ADULT COLORING BOOK VAR ED
TEEN TITANS #16 ADULT COLORING BOOK VAR ED

VERTIGO
ART OPS #4
JACKED #3 (OF 6)
LAST GANG IN TOWN #2 (OF 7)
TWILIGHT CHILDREN #4 (OF 4)
VERTIGO QUARTERLY SFX #4

BOOM
ADVENTURE TIME #48
ADVENTURE TIME ICE KING #1
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK #14
MUNCHKIN #13
REGULAR SHOW #31
SPIRE #6 (OF 8)
VENUS #2
WILDS END ENEMY WITHIN #5 (OF 4)?

DARK HORSE
COLDER TOSS THE BONES #5 (OF 5)
CONAN THE AVENGER #22
ELFQUEST FINAL QUEST #13
HELLBOY WINTER SPECIAL 2016 #1
ITTY BITTY HELLBOY SEARCH FOR THE WERE-JAGUAR #3 (OF 4)
KING CONAN WOLVES BEYOND THE BORDER #2 (OF 4)
NEGATIVE SPACE #3 (OF 4)
PASTAWAYS #8

IDW
ATOMIC ROBO & THE RING OF FIRE #5 (OF 5)
GHOSTBUSTERS INTERNATIONAL #1
JEM & THE HOLOGRAMS #11
ORPHAN BLACK HELSINKI #3 (OF 5)
TMNT ONGOING #54
TRANSFORMERS SINS OF WRECKERS #3 (OF 5)
VICTORIE CITY #1 (OF 4)
X-FILES SEASON 11 #6

IMAGE
BEAUTY #6
BLACK MAGICK #4
CHEW #54
CRY HAVOC #1
DEADLY CLASS #18
EAST OF WEST #24
FUSE #17
ISLAND #6
JUPITERS CIRCLE VOL 2 #3 (OF 6)
MONSTRESS #3
ODYC #9
OUTCAST BY KIRKMAN & AZACETA #15
PROPHET EARTH WAR #1 (OF 6)
REVIVAL #36
RINGSIDE #3
SAGA #33
SOUTHERN BASTARDS #13

VALIANT
BLOODSHOT REBORN #10
FAITH #1 (OF 4)

MISC
BLUBBER #2
DOCTOR WHO 10TH YEAR TWO #5
DREAMING EAGLES #2
HIP HOP FAMILY TREE #6
STRAYER #1
WES CRAVEN COMING OF RAGE #4 (OF 5)

MAGAZINES
MARVEL PREVIEWS #7 FEBRUARY 2016
PREVIEWS #329 FEBRUARY 2016

TRADES
A-FORCE PRESENTS TP VOL 03
APHRODITE IX REBIRTH TP VOL 01 NEW PTG
ARMOR WARS WARZONES TP
AVENGERS DEATH OF MOCKINGBIRD TP
BAKE SALE GN
BATMAN BY ED BRUBAKER TP VOL 01
BATMAN THE JIRO KUWATA BATMANGA TP VOL 03 (OF 3)
BEE AND PUPPYCAT TP VOL 02
BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA TP VOL 02
BILL TED MOST EXCELLENT COMIC BOOK ARCHIVE HC
BLACK WIDOW ITSY BITSY SPIDER TP
BOOK OF DEATH FALL OF THE VALIANT UNIVERSE TP
CURB STOMP TP
DEAD LETTERS TP VOL 02
DRAWING BEAUTIFUL WOMEN FRANK CHO METHOD SC
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS FORGOTTEN REALMS OMNIBUS
EVIL EMPIRE TP VOL 02
FRANK CHO JUNGLE GIRL TP VOL 03
GARBAGE PAIL KIDS TP
GFT WONDERLAND TP VOL 08
GROO FRIENDS AND FOES TP VOL 02
GROOT PREM HC
INHUMANS TP ATTILAN RISING
INSUFFERABLE TP VOL 01
LAZARUS TP VOL 4 POISON
MIND MGMT HC VOL 06 THE IMMORTALS
MU ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN AND AVENGERS DIGEST TP
NEIL GAIMANS TEKNOPHAGE TP VOL 01
NIGHTWING TP VOL 03 FALSE STARTS
RASPUTIN TP VOL 02
SEX TP VOL 04 DAISY CHAINS
SHIELD TP VOL 02 MAN CALLED DEATH
SHRINKING MAN TP
SONS OF ANARCHY TP VOL 04
SPIDER-WOMAN TP VOL 02 NEW DUDS
SUPERGIRL TP VOL 01 THE GIRL OF STEEL
SUPERMAN SECRET IDENTITY DLX ED HC
SWAMP THING TP VOL 07 SEASONS END
WHAT IF TP INFINITY
X-MEN TP COLOSSUS GODS COUNTRY

BACK IN STOCK
DEVOLUTION #1 (OF 5)
HARLEY QUINN & POWER GIRL #6 (OF 6)
HE-MAN & MASTERS OF UNIVERSE HC MINICOMIC
HUCK #3
MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS #0
RICK & MORTY TP VOL 01
ROBIN WAR #2 (OF 2)
SPACE RIDERS TP VOL 01 VENGEFUL UNIVERSE
WE CAN NEVER GO HOME TP

Monday, January 18, 2016

ALL STAR RECOMMENDS FOR JANUARY 19TH


David Bowie was my hero. Maybe he was yours too. If so, let’s play our favourite songs and watch The Man Who Fell to Earth and make strange, cool things and, like him, try to always move forward. We will not reshape culture as he did, but we can always try. (Art by Mike Allred)


COMIC OF THE WEEK : MY FRIEND DAHMER 
By Derf Backderf 
Published By Abrams Comic Arts 

(In need of a bit of a breather after last week’s column, here’s a 2012 review I wrote for Crime Factory on Derf Backderf’s true crime comic book account of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s youth.)

My Friend Dahmer is a painfully personal and unique book, shot through with the kind of detail that only someone close to its terrifying subject could really know. This is unsurprising, as Backderf was not only Dahmer’s classmate but also one of the few people Dahmer could ever conceivably call a “friend.” Thoroughly annotated at the rear, My Friend Dahmeris stitched together with Backderf’s own experiences with “Jeff,” anecdotes from close friends and reconstructed scenes based on information from Dahmer’s own interviews once incarcerated.

The book covers some territory that will already be familiar to those who get their kicks boning up on serial killer trivia (one of whom I am not), but from a perspective never heard from before, that of a man who walked the halls, sat in class and went on field trips with a future monster. Backderf worked on this project for twenty years, on and off, originally creating a now cult-classic slim pamphlet version before abandoning the work, continually musing on it, and finally, with his technical chops honed to the point he felt he could do the work justice, expanded to over 200 pages.

Backderf’s portrait of Dahmer is that of an obviously and increasingly troubled young man filled with odd personality quirks and a clear taste for the macabre, even as a teen. However, there is a clear sympathy for Dahmer on display and this is more than understandable given Backderf’s acquaintanceship with Dahmer and his knowledge of his traumatic home life. While the world of teens is often cold and cruel, My Friend Dahmer puts a decidedly sober adult spin on Dahmer’s treatment at the hands of his supposed “friends.” There is no humour to be found here, just honest, brutal, regret-tinged re-creations of events that make nobody involved look good, not just the subject of the book. Backderf’s scathing assessment of adult supervision and support, or lack thereof, raises some pretty serious questions. The adults are virtually invisible and a distinct delineation between the world of the teens and the world of the grown-ups is clear.

Backderf’s narration says:

“Not a single teacher or school administrator noticed a thing. Not one. Were they really that oblivious or was it that they just didn’t want to be bothered?”

Obviously, we’re talking about the ‘70s, clearly a very different time, something Backderf makes abundantly clear, but when a guidance counsellor is quoted as saying, “I can’t say that there were any signs he was different or strange,” something’s clearly gone pretty badly wrong.

In fact, it’s hard to ignore what seems to be the book’s central thrust – that the selfishness and neglect of the adults in Dahmer’s community, while not directly responsible for Jeffrey’s horrific future actions, are more than partly to blame for Dahmer becoming exactly what he became.

Dahmer’s parents fought incessantly and this, combined with Mrs Dahmer’s severe medical problems, paints a picture of a pretty miserable home life for Jeffrey and his younger brother, despite living the relatively idyllic, leafy town of Bath, Ohio where the story unfolds. It’s a town away from the worst of the seventies depression, “…the unlikeliest of breeding grounds for the most depraved serial killer since Jack The Ripper.” Following his parents separation, Dahmer was, incredibly, left alone in his home at the time he quite obviously needed support the most, entrenching an isolation which, prior to this, has been increasing incrementally, leaving him with nothing but “the voices in his head.”

At this point, it’s worth mentioning that Backderf, in both his introduction to the book and in the notes at the rear, makes no excuses for Dahmer, and states that all sympathy for Jeffrey ends the moment of his first killing. My Friend Dahmer is about the boy who would grow up to become the man who would kill seventeen people. To know the monster we need to know the man, but while the book is a scathing assessment of ‘70s society in many ways, ultimately Dahmer’s actions were his own.

Visually, My Friend Dahmer is a treat. Black and white and drawn in a cartoonish Peter Bagge-esque style, the caricatured Dahmer nonetheless bears the same mannerisms and body language as the real man, particularly in his awkward, idiosyncratic posture – straight as a board, arms at his side. I watched a short documentary on Dahmer after reading the book and a photo shown of a strapping young Dahmer at the beach mirrored this pose exactly, much to my surprise. The deceptively simple artwork also, ironically, adds to the air of menace the book carries, notably in Backderf’s wonderfully expressive faces and particularly in the case of his main subject. When the mask slips and it shows emotion, the otherwise mostly blank face of Dahmer bursts into life. This is shown perhaps most memorably in the book’s opening, when Dahmer angrily shatters one of his acid-filled road kill jars when confronted by wise-cracking classmates who sincerely doubt that even the well-known oddball they found walking in the backwoods with a dead cat would actually be experimenting with the dissolution of animal bodies.

Splash pages, especially, are a treat both artistically and symbolically, with many of them focussing on Dahmer alone – Dahmer in the woods stroking the skull of an animal whose bones he long ago stripped of flesh, Dahmer walking down an empty school hallway, head bowed, Dahmer, head tilted as he leans against a brick wall and necks from a bottle of liquor, the rear of Dahmer’s car as, silhouetted, Jeffrey open the passenger door for his first human victim. Backderf’s placement of these, and other, large images, as well as his pacing and continuity throughout the book, are reasons alone to pick the book up.

My Friend Dahmer is a very weird and very sad work, an anti-coming of age tale, told without the unfortunate myth-making or gruesome exploitative nature of many serial killer biographies. It may depress you, it will most likely anger you, but this is an important work, one arguably headed for classic status.




WEBCOMIC OF THE WEEK : GOODBYE SPACEBOY 

By Roger Langridge 

So many comic book tributes to choose from. In the end, I went with Roger Langridge’s for its very succinct but very clever use of comics icons and Bowie lyrics.


And for more comics Bowie tributes, here’s a nice collection: 




COUNTDOWN TO MOZ METAL: HEAVY METAL DECEMBER 1978

Oh, Heavy Metal! How I’ve missed stream of consciousness riffing over your fantastical wares!

Not really a spoiler: big changes in format and sensibility come to HM in 1979, so effectively this December 1978 issue marks the end of what many consider to be the glory days of this periodical’s life (up until now), even as some old favourites continue on for a while yet. As if to signify this, 1978 goes out with a bang, armed with a cover by Peter A. Jones that looks like a total stoner fever dream – a winged, alien T-Rex riding a space ship while a blood-red moon hangs in the background. Far out.

The editorial for what is oddly purported to be Christmas special is typically great, celebrating the freaks, the geeks and the psychedelic warriors who, one imagines, made up a significant percentage of the readership:

“This is for the people who make up islands, planets and houses with one of everything. Who would prefer color pictures in black and white and vice versa. Who see white river maps on printed pages. Who keep getting hints. Who can imagine giant dwarves…Seasons Greeting to everyone who can’t wait and wishes nothing were ever, really, over.”

Sindbad and company battle evil jinn riding winged steeds in a swashbuckling, smash-em-up chapter of “…Arabian Nights” that’s all Corben. Scimitars swing and crack through zombiefied foe after zombified foe in one of the least wordy extended chapters of any serial published by HM so far, showcasing Corben’s art at its crazed, kinetic best.

“This is it, my thousandth contract. I’m rich now. I can retire to my farm in Maryland.” So says the protagonist of Moebius’ “Hitman,” a fascinating change of pace from the French master in that it’s a piece of noir pastiche. Whimsical in that “Airtight Garage” way, “Hitman” is, I hate to say it, a largely disposable entry into the Moebius canon, but it is, as expected, lovely. A quirky, pleasant diversion, but what I wouldn’t give to see Moebius show some serious Jacques Tardi-like attention to his noir.

“Orion” wraps up, with Gray Morrow’s lovely, colourful art with its retro-shaped spaceships modified to resemble flying fish, sumptuous alien flora, and classic character design holding firm right until the end. It’s an abrupt, hurried conclusion, however, losing some points overall for its hurry to exit stage left. Fans of classic SF comics should make a point to seek “Orion” out, however, as even here, in this magazine of artistic curiosities, its style and classicism always stood out month to month, issue to issue.

Bilal’s jaw-dropping art continues in “Exterminator 17,” with its killer android protagonist vowing to “liberate the androids.” More beautiful SF work here, reminiscent of Nic Klein’s stellar work on Drifter, but stripped of colour. Linework this expert needs no colour, with the final splash of space suits, moons and debris an absolute show-stopper.

Philippe Druillet scoffs at your single page splashes, Bilal! Raising the stakes considerably across eye-popping double-pagers of perplexing perspective, Druillet provides art in which you may feel like its creator is attempting to code some terrible Lovecraftian secret into its corners as you vainly try to soak it all in.

There are many other assorted odds and ends within; more “Airtight Garage,” “Off-Season” and “So Beautiful, So Dangerous,” but it’s with Paul Kirchner’s “Tarot” that we’ll spend the rest of our time with for this issue. You may recall that Kirchner is the creator of The Bus, a series of short, silent strips that put a mind-bending spin on the hell that is public transport commutes (the series actually begins next issue, so expect more focus on that soon). With “Tarot” however, Kirchner delves into the HM aesthetic full force. A knight in shining silver armour astride a similarly armoured silver motorcycle (!!) rides through a desolate desert landscape to arrive at the city of Rtaz, a crumbling, stony place sculpted from rocks and nearby mountains, where “the scent of sorcery” is thick in the air. Ruined and abandoned, the city’s only citizen is a “court wizard gone mad” whom our knight is to face.

This wizard derives his power from a deck of tarot cards and Kirchner expertly uses the design of his tarot cards as both foreshadowing and comics space-time trickery. The cards mirror exactly the reality these characters find themselves in – a close up of the Knight, lance raised, is pulled back to reveal the wizard holding The Knight card, pulling The Tower card out to reveal a crumbling structure becomes the exact same structure crumbling down upon our protagonist.

Of course, this reliance on the power of his cards dooms the wizard as, face to face with the knight, he pulls The Lovers from his deck. Our knight unbuckles the suit of armour to reveal a beautiful naked woman. She embraces the lecherous wizard who dies, presumably from over-excitement. Death is the final card our victorious knight pulls from the deck, showing the embodiment of death itself rendered as a skeleton in a suit of shining armour.

Kirchner’s layouts are brilliant – cards cutting to events and back to cards – and the image of our silver knight on her silver motorcycle steed is so perfectly HM, it’s virtually iconic. Amazing stuff.




COMICS VIDEO OF THE WEEK : FROM THE GUTTERS: MIKE ALLRED 

I’ve long suspected that along with being one of the greatest artists currently working in comics that Mike Allred is also the nicest man I’ve never met. This interview, conducted by current Vertigo editorand fellow nice guy, Jamie S. Rich, confirms both of these things.

This is candid, honest, intelligent and incredibly open stuff (it’s probably Rich’s long-term friendship with Allred that coaxes forth such warmth and detail), a fascinating look into the mind and the process of a creator driven by a need to both capture and sustain real joy. Split over three parts, this is essential viewing for Allred devotees and casual fans alike.



See you next week. Love your comics.


Cameron Ashley spends a lot of time writing comics and other things you’ll likely never read. He’s the chief editor and co-publisher of Crime Factory (www.thecrimefactory.com). You can reach him @cjamesashley on Twitter.

Sunday, January 17, 2016

New Comics For Wednesday 20th of January



Heatwaves and coldsnaps, the elements outside are trying to tell you something...get your comics and stay inside and read! Take a look at what might be on your reading list for this week.

Amazing but there are still a few Marvel #1's coming out. A new CAPTAIN MARVEL #1 with an all new creative team and SILVER SURFER #1 with exactly the same creative team! A surprise hit with the first volume, DARK KNIGHT III MASTER RACE #2 (OF 8) COLLECTORS ED HC proves to be a great format to get the series in. The last Gotham City Siren to scores her our mini is POISON IVY CYCLE OF LIFE AND DEATH #1. BATGIRL TP VOL 01 SILENT KNIGHT gives you the chance to catch up with one of the Bat-family's favourite members, Cassandra Cain. GRAYSON TP VOL 01 AGENTS OF SPYRAL TP and GRAYSON TP VOL 02 WE ALL DIE AT DAWN in the same week makes is pretty sweet for big fans of super spy, Dick Grayson. More back story to one of the biggest scoundrels a galaxy far, far away from masters Charles Soule and Alex Maleev in STAR WARS TP LANDO. Aaron's excellent start to the goddess of thunder, now in softcover with THOR TP VOL 01 GODDESS OF THUNDER. Find out what is the untold story of Wonder Woman's early years of training to become the greatest Amazon of them all in LEGEND OF WONDER WOMAN #1. Turn back the evolutionary clock in Rick Remender's latest, DEVOLUTION #1. Perfectly suited to 100 Bullets writer, Brian Azzarello, AMERICAN MONSTER #1 from new publisher, AfterShock brings us a tale of story small town gang violence and rises to power. Dean Rankine's rascally rabbits return in their next not so PG adventure with ITTY BITTY BUNNIES POP TARTS ONE SHOT. Bladerunner and Terminator combine together to for the print run of web series, MAN PLUS #1 by Spider-Verse artist André Lima Araújo. Morbid title but solid event book for the Valiant line, BOOK OF DEATH TP is out.

Spot something else you are after let us know and we'll get you sorted.

MARVEL
ASTONISHING ANT-MAN #4
CAPTAIN MARVEL #1
DARK TOWER DRAWING OF THREE LADY OF SHADOWS #5 (OF 5)
DEADPOOL #6
DRAX #3
HERCULES #3
MARVEL UNIVERSE AVENGERS ASSEMBLE SEASON TWO #15
MS MARVEL #3
NEW AVENGERS #5
PATSY WALKER AKA HELLCAT #2
SILVER SURFER #1
STAR WARS #15
STAR-LORD #3
STARBRAND AND NIGHTMASK #2
UNCANNY INHUMANS #4
UNCANNY X-MEN #2

DC COMICS
BATGIRL #47
BATMAN #48 ADULT COLORING BOOK VAR ED
BATMAN AND ROBIN ETERNAL #16
BATMAN ARKHAM KNIGHT GENESIS #6 (OF 6)
DARK KNIGHT III MASTER RACE #2 (OF 8) COLLECTORS ED HC
DOCTOR FATE #8
HARLEY QUINN #24
INJUSTICE GODS AMONG US YEAR FIVE #2
INJUSTICE GODS AMONG US YEAR FOUR ANNUAL #1
LEGEND OF WONDER WOMAN #1 (OF 9)
MARTIAN MANHUNTER #8 ADULT COLORING BOOK VAR ED
POISON IVY CYCLE OF LIFE AND DEATH #1 (OF 6)
ROBIN SON OF BATMAN #8 ADULT COLORING BOOK VAR ED
SECRET SIX #10
SINESTRO #19 ADULT COLORING BOOK VAR ED
SUPERMAN WONDER WOMAN #25 ADULT COLORING BOOK VAR ED
TITANS HUNT #4 (OF 12) ADULT COLORING BOOK VAR ED
WONDER WOMAN #48 ADULT COLORING BOOK VAR ED

VERTIGO
ASTRO CITY #31
CLEAN ROOM #4
FABLES THE WOLF AMONG US #13
LUCIFER #2
RED THORN #3

BOOM
BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA #20
JIM HENSONS STORYTELLER DRAGONS #2
LAST CONTRACT #1
LUMBERJANES #22

DARK HORSE
BPRD HELL ON EARTH #139
BTVS SEASON 10 #23
CALL OF DUTY BLACK OPS III #3 (OF 6)
DARK HORSE PRESENTS 2014 #18
DRAGON AGE MAGEKILLER #2 (OF 5)
EVE VALKYRIE #4 (OF 4)
ROOK #4
STEAM MAN #4 (OF 5)
USAGI YOJIMBO #151

DYNAMITE
DEVOLUTION #1 (OF 5)
PATHFINDER HOLLOW MOUNTAIN #3 (OF 6)

IDW
AMAZING FOREST #1
JUDGE DREDD (ONGOING) #2
TRANSFORMERS #49
TRANSFORMERS ROBOTS IN DISGUISE ANIMATED #6

IMAGE
ASTRONAUTS IN TROUBLE #8
DESCENDER #8
I HATE FAIRYLAND #4
LEGACY OF LUTHER STRODE #4
NOWHERE MEN #7
PENCIL HEAD #1 (OF 5)
PHONOGRAM THE IMMATERIAL GIRL #6 (OF 6)
POSTAL #9
SYMMETRY #2
TOKYO GHOST #5
WAYWARD #13
WOLF #5

ONI
BLOOD FEUD #4 (OF 5)

VALIANT
IMPERIUM #12
WRATH OF THE ETERNAL WARRIOR #3

MISC
AMERICAN MONSTER #1
CROSSED PLUS 100 #13
HANGMAN #2
ITTY BITTY BUNNIES POP TARTS ONE SHOT
MAN PLUS #1 (OF 4)
RACHEL RISING #39
SIMPSONS COMICS #225
STREET FIGHTER UNLIMITED #2 CVR B CRUZ ULTRA JAM
SUPERZERO #2
WAKFU #2 (OF 8)
WELCOME TO SHOWSIDE #3

TRADES
68 TP VOL 05 HOMEFRONT
ADVENTURES OF DOG MENDONCA PIZZABOY TP VOL 03 REQUIEM
ALL NEW X-MEN TP VOL 07 UTOPIANS
ASM INHUMAN ALL NEW CAPTAIN AMERICA INHUMAN ERROR TP
BATGIRL TP VOL 01 SILENT KNIGHT
BATMAN DETECTIVE COMICS TP VOL 06 ICARUS
BOOK OF DEATH TP
DOCTOR WHO PRISONERS OF TIME TP
ENVELOPE MANUFACTURER GN
FRANK IN THE 3RD DIMENSION HC
JUDGE DREDD DAILY DREDDS HC VOL 01
GRAYSON TP VOL 01 AGENTS OF SPYRAL TP
GRAYSON TP VOL 02 WE ALL DIE AT DAWN
LOLA XOXO TP VOL 01
MARVEL FRONTIER COMICS TP COMPLETE COLLECTION
MIDNIGHT SOCIETY BLACK LAKE TP
MONSTER TP VOL 07 PERFECT ED URASAWA
MUIRWOOD LOST ABBEY TP
NEW TEEN TITANS TP VOL 04
PALEO COMPLETE COLLECTION TP
POLARITY HC
PUNISHER MAX TP VOL 01 COMPLETE COLLECTION
REVIVAL DLX COLL HC VOL 03
SHOWCASE PRESENTS BATMAN TP VOL 06
STAR TREK ONGOING TP VOL 11
STAR WARS TP LANDO
THOR TP VOL 01 GODDESS OF THUNDER
THUNDERBOLTS CLASSIC TP VOL 01 NEW PTG
TRANSFORMERS GI JOE TYRANTS RISE HEROES ARE BORN TP
X-MEN TP VOL 01 INFERNO

MERCH
DC COMICS ICONS HARLEY QUINN STATUE

BACK IN STOCK
JUSTICE LEAGUE DARKSEID WAR BATMAN #1 2ND PTG
JUSTICE LEAGUE DARKSEID WAR FLASH #1 2ND PTG
JUSTICE LEAGUE DARKSEID WAR GREEN LANTERN #1 2ND P
JUSTICE LEAGUE DARKSEID WAR SHAZAM #1 2ND PTG
JUSTICE LEAGUE DARKSEID WAR SUPERMAN #1 2ND PTG
LOVE & ROCKETS LIBRARY JAIME GN VOL 01 MAGGIE MECH
LUMBERJANES TP VOL 01
OBI-WAN AND ANAKIN #1 (OF 5)
PAPER GIRLS #1
PAPER GIRLS #2
PAPER GIRLS #3
PAPER GIRLS #4

SWAMP THING #1 (OF 6)

Monday, January 11, 2016

ALL STAR RECOMMENDS FOR JANUARY 12TH



Hiya, 

“Best of” lists are weird and subjective things that ultimately just come down to which art objects batted their pretty eyelashes at the matching aesthetic sensibilities of any reviewer on any day. So, with that in mind, here’s mine for 2015. I honestly could have doubled both the honourable mentions and top spots, but in the end I went for fifteen of each – thirty titles in total that indicate a wonderfully creative year just gone by.

Just a quick disclaimer, I rarely read floppies these days, so it’s collections and one shots for me. There are also some gaps in my reading for the year because, you might be surprised to know, I sometimes do other things besides read comics. I haven’t gotten around to Sandman: Overture, for example, and I’m waiting for a deluxe, single volume of The Fade Out because I’m fancy like that. There are others too, so forgive me if your favourites ain’t here.

The below is a mix of new pieces and reviews from old columns I’ve clipped and tinkered with, because it seems crazy to rewrite them (except Sexcoven which I rewrote from scratch). I’ve indicated this self-plagiarism where appropriate. 

HONOURABLE MENTIONS 
(in no particular order)

The Eternaut 

by Héctor Germán Oesterheld & Francisco Solano López (Fantagraphics), 

Injection vol.1 
by Warren Ellis, Declan Shalvey & Jordie Bellaire (Image), 

The Abaddon 
by Koren Shadmi (Z2 Comics), 

Chicago 
by Glenn Head (Fantagraphics), 

Shigeru Mizuki’s Hitler 
by Shigeru Mizuki (D&Q),

Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu 
by Junji Ito (Kodansha), 

Black River 
by Josh Simmons (Fantagraphics), 

Invisible Republic vol.1 
by Gabriel Hardman & Corinna Bechko (Image), 

Master Keaton vols.2 & 3 
by Naoki Urasawa (Viz), 

Last Man vols.1&2 
by Balak, Michael Sanlaville & Bastien Vives (First Second), 

Southern Bastards Book One 
by Jason Aaron & Jason Latour (Image), 

Deadly Class vols. 2 & 3 
by Rick Remender, Wes Craig & Lee Loughridge (Image),

Lone Sloane: Delirius 
by Jacques Lob & Phillipe Druillet (Titan), 

Annihilator 
by Grant Morrison & Frazer Irving (Legendary), 

Displacement 
by Lucy Knisley (Fantagraphics).



THE BEST OF 2015 
(in no particular order)



UNFLATTENING

By Nick Sousanis
Published By University of Harvard Press

If you want your comics to give you the kind of mad mind-swirl and existential gut tingles you can only get from philosophy or drugs, Unflattening is the book for you. It will make you question everything from the way you look out the window, to the intensity of your dog’s reality, to exactly how the way you’ve been educated to perceive the world and our place in it has limited us all. Unflattening is 2015s most important comics work, blending our favourite medium with philosophy, art, history, science, literature, astronomy and comics itself to create “an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint.” It’s kind of like Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics mutated into “Understanding Everything.”

Essentially, “Unflattening” (as a term) refers to “a simultaneous engagement of multiple viewpoints from which to engender new ways of seeing.” This can be achieved, in basic form, by simply as closing one eye, then the other, then considering that your visual perception already comes from two different, “overlapping” source points or by thinking about how amazing it is that dogs’ profoundly developed senses actually function as a “time capsule” of all manner of information, or even by Nick Sousanis choosing to create his thesis on perspective by quoting everything from Plato to The Wizard of Oz to Eratosthenes and utilising the comics medium to do so. The book fairly crackles with ideas and not just in terms of its subject but in its construction. Sousanis’ layouts are superbly creative and clever, frequently even lovely, enabling everything from the complexity of astronomy; the idea of parallax, the rhizomatic thought structures of Deleuze and Guattari, the visual representations of scent, to be easily and hungrily digested by his readers.

Unflattening is an idea-bomb, an essential read. Personally, I had a difficult 2015. I lost sight of a great many things, my writing, my friendships, my happiness as my world and my perception continually narrowed, “flattened.” For me, Unflattening functioned both as new thought and potent reminder of something that can slip away when things get hard: we are not limited to what we feel, what we see, what others tell us is the definitive, final answer on virtually anything.

If I can quote just a little more:

“The ways of seeing put forth are offered not as steps to follow, but as an attitude, a means of orientation, a multidimensional compass, to help us find our way beyond the confines of “how it is” and seek out new ways of being in directions not only northwards and upwards but outwards, inwards and in dimensions not yet within our imagination.”

I wish I could thank Nick Sousanis for Unflattening. It’s a comic to be savoured and re-read again and again. It has almost as many layers are there are potential ways of seeing.



SUNNY Vol.5 
By Taiyo Matsumoto 
Published By Viz 

Sweet, perfect heartbreak awaits readers of Taiyo Matsumoto’s Sunny, amped up to absolute artistic perfection with 2015’s volume 5, a book so bittersweet and beautiful it may well choke you up.

Semi-autobiographical in nature, Sunny is manga-ka Matsumoto (Tekkonkinkreet) taking readers back to a kids foster home in the 1970s, where his cast of adorable and feisty kids are forced to come to terms with parental abandonment, the big, sad world of grownups and each other, seeking refuge in an old yellow Datsun Sunny where their imaginations are given free reign.

The kids’ relationships with their mothers take centre stage for much of volume 5, with these orphaned and abandoned struggling youths to move forward in young lives anchored to ghostly parental figures. The cast’s most precocious character, Haruo, abandons an inter-home baseball tournament to explore the big city. Hanging out with Tsuda, a seemingly street wise kid from another school, Haruo shakes down a city kid for money, smokes cigarettes and plays video games. When Haruo loses a tin of Nivea cream, Tsuda shoplifts a fresh can for him, aware that Haruo smells the cream as a way of remembering a mother he’s forgetting. ‘Jus’ exterminate ‘em from your brain,” Tsuda says of Haruo’s parents, “Erase ‘em.”

Sei has lost all contact with his parents, but has a plan to bust out of Star Kids and find them. His attempt to steal a car goes awry and given detention, staff read his heart-breaking journal, detailing, step by step his meticulously planned escape strategy and are forced to confess they now have no idea where his parents actually are.

Junsuke’s caught a nasty strain of Japanese flu and hallucinating both huge and miniature versions of himself and little brother, Shosuke, he forces himself through a nasty medicinal shot by thinking of his very sick mother, who likely goes through far worse on a daily basis.

I won’t spoil any more of the book, suffice it to say that it’s tender to the point of bruising, with Matsumoto’s gorgeous, dreamy art, with its flourishes of magical realism via the children’s imagination and simply inspired cutaways and “editing,” make for a clinic on evocative and emotive comics, proof that powerful, dynamic storytelling can be achieved without physical conflict, exposition or dazzling colours. Sunny wraps up some time this year with a final volume. My own conflicted heart might not be able to take either what I presume will be a powerful conclusion or the absence of further volumes from my reading life.



SACRED HEART 
By Liz Suburbia 
Published By Fantagraphics 

(Review taken and edited from All Star Recommends September 29th

Years ago, all the adults disappeared from the town of Alexandria, leaving the kids to carry on in their absence. On the whole, Sacred Heart’s cast of teenaged punks, nerds and jocks, navigating the minefields of their surging hormones, the complexity of their inter-personal relationships and the responsibility of raising younger siblings, does incredibly well without any grown-ups to guide them. It’s not all punk rock parties and young love, however. An apocalyptic vibe hangs over Alexandria, with the kids well aware of what’s happened to their parents, an odd religious undercurrent and, much more ominously, murders committed on their suburban streets.

Ben Schiller is one of Alexandria’s teens. She’s got a crush on a handsome football player with secrets of his own, an increasingly complicated relationship with her best friend Otto and a sister named Empathy who she worries about constantly. Sacred Heart is seen predominantly through Ben’s eyes and Suburbia expertly dilutes the high concept nature of Sacred Heart’s premise with beautiful moments of both character interaction and the continuing banality of everyday existence. Even in this most unusual of circumstances, the young characters struggle to keep on keeping on as time marches onward and more of their peers are killed.

Suburbia’s cartooning is just lovely, with her punk rock kids, starkly contrasting black and white and even her lettering recalling Jaime Hernandez by way of Brandon Graham’s full-lipped, rounded figures of all sizes and shapes. Her layouts are superb and her manipulation of comics space-time is a highlight. Her montage pages are exceptional, widening out her “lens” to cover a large portion of her cast in single-panel, everyday moments, creating breadth and scope within her world and yet also intimacy. Each of her characters is distinctive and whole, with his or her mannerisms and psychological concerns and, although it does not affect the narrative at all, the social order of High School intriguingly remains very much intact even though classes are no longer in session.

Sacred Heart is difficult to discuss without spoiling. It’s a comic that cares more about its characters than pushing its plot (the major story reveal is literally on the very last page, so don’t flip to the end if you are perusing a copy) but with Suburbia’s teens talking and interacting like actual teens, the complete banishment of exposition is actually one of the book’s great strengths. Its surprising subtlety and ambiguity means that much is left unexplained or to the reader to decode and further mysteries are revealed as existing ones tie up. However, Sacred Heart is created with such a sure hand that there’s no doubt Suburbia knows where she’s headed and how she’s going to get there.

Sacred Heart is, at over 300 pages, a complex, thrilling and lovingly created graphic novel that deserves not only a massive teen audience but also one way beyond the confines of that demographic.

Bring on part two, please.



THE PUMA BLUES: THE COMPLETE SAGA IN ONE VOLUME 
By Stephen Murphy & Michael Zulli 
Published By Dover 

Although you might be struck by the irony of reading a massive, near-600 page lament over ever-escalating environmental catastrophe in a hardback with thick glossy pages, The Puma Blues more than deserves the lavish treatment Dover gives it.

A near lost-classic, The Puma Blues was a trailblazer of the ‘80s indie scene, running mainly from 86-89, a book that struggled to survive marketplace shifts and distributor tussles, all of which is recounted in an excellent Afterword by Stephen Bissette. It remained uncompleted until now, with original creators writer Stephen Murphy (TMNT) and artist Michael Zulli (Sandman) back in the saddle to provide an expansive conclusion to their abandoned baby.

Gavia Immer works for a shadowy government department in a US where The Bronx has been blown up in an act of domestic neo-nazi terrorism (a perhaps prescient notion) and is tasked with collecting rare species of animals, mutated thanks to pollution and environmental ruin by “shooting” them with a gun that transports the animals to “a US-Sino laboratory/reserve…in the People’s Republic of China.” Sequestered in a cabin deep in the woods, Immer’s only contact with the outside world is through rare visits from his superiors, video calls (essentially face time) with his mother and conversations with a trespasser on the land. Whiling away the hours studying wildlife (mainly in the form of flying manta rays) and watching old video tapes left behind by his deceased father – tapes exploring his father’s fascination with ufology, reality and philosophy – Immer’s detachment from the city increases exponentially and his ruminations on his father’s lectures as he studies a poisoned habitat around him lead to a significant personality shift.

Deeply melancholic, dreamy and poetic, The Puma Blues sucks readers in with Zulli’s stunningly realised flora and fauna and Murphy’s skilful linking of science, philosophy and speculation. Deep connections are explored – fathers and sons, man and technology, vegetation and animal – and although essentially plotless, the book will undoubtedly find its connections with you too. Bissette, in his Afterword, perfectly describes The Puma Blues as “a jazz-like comic book meditation on our culture’s headlong rush toward ecological disaster.” At times flowing seemingly freeform, at others structured rigidly, the highlight, proving Bissette’s point, is an extended sequence of nothing but animals in the woods at night, the titular puma, owls, deer, raccoons, frogs – a threatened ecosystem at work, a world within a world. With sound effects signalling the movements of these creatures, I actually experienced such a strange sense of peace in reading the chapter that I almost felt a part of the landscape Murphy and Zulli created. Which, of course, is the absolute intention – it’s an evocation of what we are rapidly losing.

Also featuring an introduction by Dave Sim and a short story by Alan Moore, The Puma Blues is a beautiful, brave book finally, thankfully completed and returned to the world, a virtual brick of comics as utter poetry.



MOOSE 
By Max De Radigues 
Published By Conundrum International 

(Review taken and edited from All Star Recommends July 14th

Occasionally something comes along that completely derails my plans for this column as I become unexpectedly and totally obsessed with it. Moose, by Canadian creator Max De Radigues, became one of these things last year. Originally published in serialised mini-comics format by Charles Forsman’s Oily Comics, Moose was collected in its entirety in a lovely softcover by Conundrum International.

Joe is a sensitive and unpopular high school student who escapes some truly abhorrent bullying by slipping off into his small town surroundings to enjoy the wide open, snowy expanse of the landscape as well as the animals that populate it. He spots a big bull of a moose on one of these outings and the two share a tense moment before the animal realises that Joe means him no harm and disappears amongst the snow and the trees. The moose reappears, seemingly only to Joe himself, and becomes an object of fascination for the boy. Jason is Joe’s bully, a cruel, incredibly sadistic kid, whose bullying constantly escalates in cruelty and violence.

Both boys lack parental figures – Joe is raised by his grandmother and single mother, Jason by his grandparents and have clearly experienced some trauma in their development. This, however, is where the similarities between them end and when Jason follows Joe out into the wilderness one day, their conflict inevitably comes to a head.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Moose is the contrast of the two worlds, the two “natures,” presented. We have the school itself, bound by its own pecking order of cruelty, where Joe (the small, weak prey) can only feel safe by hiding himself in nests and burrows like the janitor’s closet or the sick bay. Making this cleverly apparent is a picture above the sick bay bed of an unborn baby sleeping in the womb hanging directly above Joe as he curls into the foetal position and snatches some rest, safe for now in this otherwise hostile environment. Contrast this with the world outside the school, mountainous and ice cold, a seemingly inhospitable environment, filled with predators of its own, yet one in which Joe is at home and always safe, despite his elders telling him “the woods are dangerous.” Jason, however, is not as home here as you would imagine one so predatory to be and his punishment for this trespass is brilliantly executed.

It’s difficult to say too much more without spoiling the work, but outside of De Radigues’ simple yet strikingly effective cartooning, I would also like to make note of his excellent little technical trick of inverting the tail of off-speaking word balloons to indicate the speech coming from outside his chosen shot. It’s a neat and innovative trick, one I can’t recall if I’ve seen before off the top of my head outside of some manga here and there. Go pick up this handsomely designed heartbreaker of a book.



SUPREME: BLUE ROSE 
By Warren Ellis & Tula Lotay 
Published By Image 

From time to time, I get random text messages from a friend of mine named Steve. Here’s one he sent me last week:

“What if Warren Ellis wrote a 1980s-era Grant Morrison comic when he was still heavily influenced by Alan Moore = Supreme Blue Rose.”

That Steve. When he’s right, he’s right. Stunningly illustrated by one of my own absolute personal faves, Tula Lotay and featuring inspired scripts by Warren Ellis, who (if I can add to Steve’s soup of writer-influences) throws in some Dennis Potter vibes to create one of the strangest yet most artful books of his career, Supreme: Blue Rose is shockingly good.

For those who don’t know, the character of Supreme was concocted by Rob Liefeld to be his very own creator-owned Superman analogue, an uninspired, grey-haired musclebound character of ultimately little interest. Supreme got a second life, however, when Alan Moore got hold of him and brought to the title all the goofy 1960s Silver Age elements that were discarded from Superman as DC honed and altered the characters origins over the decades. It was brilliant. Not quite this brilliant, however. Supreme: Blue Rose has Ellis and Lotay concocting a hypnotic mind-bender, a mega-meta comic that’s complex and lovely in its construction and daring in execution.

Treating comic book reboots as manipulations of time and space, with “revisions” occurring “when time gets sick,” Supreme: Blue Rose finds down on her luck reporter Diana Dane hired by wealthy Darius Dax to find the missing Ethan Crane – Supreme – while keeping up with her favourite television serial (the amazing surrealist pulp adventures of Professor Night) sorting through “poisoned” evidence and warding off what she fears is schizophrenic meltdown as dreams become lucid and information feels as though it’s coming “from somewhere else” in the form of visitations from an Ethan Crane “lost in the new real world.”

Heady stuff for a reboot of a rebooted comic starring a Superman rip-off.

Lotay’s gorgeously posed femmes, like film noir icons, steal the show. Her female characters are beautifully, classically garbed (fashion is something that I don’t think gets talked about enough in comics), elegant and poised. Far from ignored, her male characters are dashing and distinct. She makes Supreme: Blue Rose easily one of the most visually striking books of 2015.

You might also get the feeling that a series essentially about an incorrectly rebooted Supreme is Ellis poking a little fun at his own inability to do exactly that, but if all reboots were this thoughtful, unique, dreamy and intoxicatingly illustrated, we’d all be rich in “revisions,” praying for a sick time to never quite regain its health.



INNER CITY ROMANCE 
By Guy Colwell 
Published By Fantagraphics Books 

(Review taken and edited from All Star Recommends April 28th

In the early '70s, radicals and progressive thinkers inspired by the work of Kirby, Ditko and Lee began taking over Marvel, filling the company’s books with pop-depictions of existential angst and LSD-inspired colour bursts. At the same time, many artists of the comics underground were channelling their drug experiences as well as their social concerns into comix of humanist merit and real-world anti-authoritarianism. The work of Guy Colwell, in his Inner City Romance, is a prime example of this.

Over five issues dating from 1972-1978, Colwell created a cast of ex-cons, hippies, tenement dwellers and acid rockers who battled racism, poverty, the greed of the rich, the reach of The Man, and the depravity of incarceration. Colwell’s heavily African-American cast, use of urban slang and sympathy towards the downtrodden led many readers to believe that Colwell was in fact himself black. “I suppose it was natural to think I was black,” Colwell is quoted as saying in Patrick Rosenkrantz’s introduction, “because so few white creators would touch subjects like I did. Black concerns, issues, stories would be left to black authors/artists to deal with.”

Colwell, jailed as a conscientious objector, was a fine artist whose intricately detailed paintings, murals and prints depicted his love of nature and man's place in it. His prison stint politicised him further, however, and led him to channel his activism and anger at the inequality and injustice of the day and depict it on the comics page. Inner City Romance #1 sold over 50,000 copies over multiple printings, a staggering amount by today's standards. It featured a trio of freshly released ex-cons facing a choice between the seductions of the “free” world and the discipline and belief required to make significant change within it.

Colwell’s black-and-white art shifts from issue to issue, reflecting his growth as an artist, his desire to speed up the artistic process, and to suit the particular needs of his individual tales. It never less than striking. At its peak, it’s lovely – beautifully depicting the contrasts between the inner life and the outer. The profoundness of the LSD experience, the expression of desires in the dream lives of the incarcerated (even if this particular segment turns nightmarish) and the psychedelic dimension-hop of death are all contrasted with the ugliness and the struggles of urban life. Colwell's cities are grim, trash-filled places, where the white and the wealthy rule and the downtrodden, kept under thumb, have only sex, drugs, music, radicalism and one another to keep them at bay.

Sure, some of the slang is dated and it’s clearly a product of its time, but Colwell’s concerns are, sadly, still our concerns. This book clearly demonstrates that anger, frustration and a desire for change can produce quite the creative fire. Packed with essays and beautiful colour reproductions of Colwell’s social realist paintings, Inner City Romance is highly, highly recommended.



THE COMPLETE EIGHTBALL 
By Daniel Clowes 
Published By Fantagraphics 

This feels a little like cheating, for some reason. An unfair inclusion on this list. A cheeky sandwiching in of an all-time classic on a list of (largely) material of recent creation. Like bringing a gun to a knife fight. In any event, Fantagraphics unleashed the two-volume, slipcased, The Complete Eightball1-18 (1989-1998) last year after a period of ridiculously long gestation. Having the final product in hand, however, it’s clear why the thing took so long to come out. Binding together facsimile versions of each individual issue, The Complete Eightball switches paper, issue cover stock and format to perfectly recreate the individual issues as they appeared. Along with The Eternaut (also published by Fantagraphics), The Complete Eightball was one of 2015's comics art objects of the year, a loving tribute to and a virtual brick of ground-breaking comics for readers new and old to savour.

Leaving aside classics like Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Ghost World and Young Dan Pussey, all serialised within Eightball, the reappearance of Clowes’ short stories, peppered throughout the book show the cartoonist’s range and gift with the surreal, the dramatic and the off-kilter. For me, Clowes is at his strongest when he’s being serious -- for example, I could ramble forever about “Like a Weed, Joe,” with its teenage protagonist scrawling a love note in the sand only to have its possible reply washed away by the tide.

“Like a Weed, Joe,” as with many a Clowes tale is narrated by an older version of a character reminiscing back on a particular time with an analytical, dispassionate tone. The reader has no idea whether or not these characters are now happy, fulfilled or secure – all we get is this one sliver of their lives at their most awkward or insecure, melancholy generated as we are left to wonder what happened to them. A writing teacher of mine once described the Literary short story as always being a slice of the in-between, your readers dropped in to your characters’ lives for only the moment of middle you allow them to be a part of. There is no origin, there is no denouement, there is/are only the moment/s of the tale. It’s hard to find a greater example of this than “Like a Weed, Joe,” demonstrating Clowes’ skill at pushing the insecurities of the sensitive and artistic to the painful fore.

For a moment, forget the meticulous, superlative presentation of The Complete Eightball, forget the longer, well-established classics within, because for tales like “Like a Weed, Joe” alone this book easily makes its way onto a Best Of list almost twenty years after #18, the final issue bound within the second hardcover volume, was first published.



AAMA 
By Frederik Peeters 
Published By Self Made Hero 

(Review taken and edited from All Star Recommends November 2nd

Technonatural creation processes, to slightly paraphrase the character of Dr Rajeev, are at the heart of Frederik Peeters’ astonishing Aama, stories taking the SF paradigm of informational systems running amok into some new and beautifully terraformed imaginative spaces.

Aama is Swiss writer/artist Peeters’ award-winning four-volume saga, the final two volumes -- three and four -- of which arrived in 2015. Surely destined to be considered as classic as the work of Moebius, Druillet and others I bang on about every week in the Heavy Metal recaps, Aama has both the heaviness of concept and philosophy as well as the boundlessly inventive world-building you want in your finest far-future Euro SF.

Verloc Nim is a wreck of a man. His marriage has failed, he’s lost custody of his daughter, Lilja, he’s been swindled out of his family’s antique book business and he’s struggling to find meaning in an increasingly bleak and stoned existence. Verloc finds purpose anew, however, in the form of his estranged brother Conrad, who now works as something of a Mr Fixit for the Muy-Tang Corporation, one of numerous corporate entities responsible for a “great crisis.” Conrad’s latest mission sees him off to the planet Ona(ji) to ascertain what’s happened to a group of scientists outposted there to work on the mysterious “Aama” project. Conrad convinces Verloc to accompany both him and his cigar-smoking, simian-styled robot, Churchill, on the mission. And so begins arguably one of the finest cosmic epics ever in comics, certainly of the modern era.

Aama, to simplify, is a form of AI-driven nanotech. Verloc and co arrive on Ona(ji) to find the mission in ruins, Aama on the loose, and the world terraformed in increasingly strange and wondrous ways as they trek across the landscape the find Aama itself, who has for all intents and purposes, become the planet’s (re)creator and god. Over four 80-plus page volumes, Peeters slowly amps up his already impressive visual design; there is a surprise waiting on almost every page once the story truly gets underway, from techno-organic insects, to vaginal Venus fly traps, to lush forests of alien flowers all pulled from Peeters’ fertile mind.

Secrets over the project and the true nature of Aama unfurl, as well as Verloc’s true destiny and the plans Aama has for his daughter, a doppelganger of whom has somehow arrived on Ona(ji). Volumes three and Four, “The Desert of Mirrors” and “You Will Be Glorious, My Daughter” are as enthralling a read as I’ve had in 2015, with Peeters showing complete distain for the laws of nature and physics as well as time and space – both of our reality and comics space -- in ways reminiscent of Morrison and Quitely’s finest collaborations, reminders that there are some things that comics will only ever be able to do, other mediums be damned.

It’s easy to do Cosmic Freakout in comics but it’s a very difficult thing to pull it off with this much heart and this much intelligence with no irony at all and no heavy reliance on the canon of cosmic comics. Peeters manages not only this, but even seamlessly sandwiches in a super-powered punch-up and it’s one of such originality and imagination that its city-wide destruction is turned into something beautiful, the landscape modified and warped in the slipstream of the carnage and the godlike power of one of its combatants.

Aama is the product of a masterful singular vision. Beautiful and mad and packed with true emotion, it’s a wonderful take on posthumanity and the endless possibilities of something like nanotech, an already captivating speculative technological concept. An absolute classic.



NEW LONE WOLF & CUB 
By Kazuo Koike & Hideki Mori 
Published By Dark Horse Comics 


(THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE ORIGINAL LONE WOLF &CUB) 


This should not work. No way, no how. New Lone Wolf & Cub should not be this good. Perhaps it’s a similar, pervading sense of disbelief that’s led to few readers and certainly few critics to give this book the attention and praise that should be heaped upon it. Perhaps it’s the gender representation, not Koike’s strong suit to be fair to those who take issue with him, but given the setting and the strength of the large amount of female characters, if that’s what is holding you back, you might be surprised. Although Dark Horse’s English language editions debuted in July 2014, it’s really only in 2015 that the series hit its real stride. After a painstaking amount of careful and compelling table-setting, the masterful Kazuo Koike has turned the back end of his unlikely sequel into reading as thrilling and surprising as his original canonised tale.

Picking up seconds after the conclusion of the original, New Lone Wolf & Cub sees Daigoro Itto, young son of the deceased Ogami Itto, collapsed by the side of his deceased father. Samurai Togo Shigekata finds the boy and soon realises who and what he has on his hands. Shigekata is master of jigen-ryu swordsmanship – the art of striking down a foe with a single stroke of a dotanuki sword, the type favoured by Ogami Itto. Taking Daigoro in, Shigekata (a fictionalised version of a real life samurai) begins training the boy in the art of jigen-ryu and the pair soon becomes enmeshed in a political plot filled with gender-swapping assassins, clans of spies, bandits, half Russian half-Japanese ninjas and the most determined and diabolical antagonist seen in recent comics memory as the shoganate clandestinely attempts to gain control of Shigekata’s home province of Satsuma.

Hideki Mori gamely steps up to fill the late, great Goseki Kojima’s considerable artistic shoes (hand-picked by Koike, who even asked permission of Kojima’s widow to continue the story) and he’s an inspired choice, updating the gritty, inky detail of Kojima’s work with the flash of a Ryoichi Ikegami (Ikegami, interestingly, drew a far less successful sequel to Koike’s Lady Snowblood following the passing of original artist – and hero of yours truly – Kazuo Kamimura). Everything, from riveting ocean battles to Shigekata’s opponents being gruesomely bisected, to a bad guy smuggling himself inside the corpse of a blue whale (!!), to the vast array of expressions on little Daigoro’s face and the blisters on his hands from training are just exceptionally drawn.

The faintest whiff of the magical hangs over Koike’s complex and increasingly bizarre political drama, as it did in the original, with characters shifting appearance from male to female with a rub of the face, or mesmerising with a swirling glance from a pair of hypnotic eyes. The fight sequences are increasingly thrilling and lop-sided in their good guy to bad guy ratio, the bond between Togo Shigekata and Daigoro is superbly developed, the stakes are super high and when little Daigoro hefts a real blade for the very first time in order to defend his new father figure you may well actually cheer out loud.

I believe that two volumes remain for publication in 2016 before the series wraps up. If you’re not on board already, binge-read one through seven and marvel at the plotting of Koike – how he turns the tables back and forth – and the brilliance of Mori as they somehow both intelligently and luridly spin Daigoro’s latest (last?) adventure.


THE MARQUIS OF ANAON: THE ISLE OF BRAC & THE BLACK VIRGIN 
By Fabien Vehlmann & Matthieu Bonhomme 
Published By Cinebook 


“When gales buffet the seas surrounding the isle of Brac, it is said that one may hear the voices of the dead, that they speak to the living bewailing misfortunes that lie ahead.”So begins “The Isle of Brac,” the first volume of The Marquis of Anaon. It’s an evocative start to a moody, suspenseful work of bande desinee.

Jean-Baptiste Poulain arrives by boat at the isle of Brac, wearing his newest and best finery in an effort to impress his new employer, Baron Gwenole, a man spoken of in whispers as “The Ogre.” The natives, immediately coming off as both impoverished and somewhat backward, fawn over him, remarking that in his tri-corner hat he looks well to do, like a “young Marquis.” For their attention, they are beaten and whipped by Yvon, one of the Baron’s servants, the first hint of many at mistreatment and cruelty on the isle.

Poulain has arrived in Brac to tutor Nolwen, Baron Gwenole’s son. However, when Nolwen is found beaten to death, the isle’s secrets, superstitions and possible supernatural connections begin to reveal themselves. Poulain, trapped on Brac, a place supposedly in touch with the realm of the after life, becomes something of a reluctant protagonist. Having suffered serious childhood traumas of his own, Nolwen’s death hits Poulain hard and, marked as an outsider on an isle full of outsiders cut off from the rest of the world, he finds himself in ever-increasing danger and is drawn closer and closer to the terrible secrets surrounding Nolwen’s death. “This isle is making me ill,” Poulain says, overwhelmed by death, dread and local myth, yet trapped on Brac, he has no other choice than to find the resolve to dig into the mystery surrounding the murder.

Velhmann’s other translated work includes the All Star Recommended Beautiful Darkness with illustrators Kerascoet (D&Q) and the (personally) disappointingly scripted 7 Psychopaths with Sean Phillips on art chores (Boom). Velhmann’s writing here is at once taut and expansive – a lot is packed into these 48 pages, yet the pacing is perfect – and with echoes of Dumas, Hugo and a dose of the gothic-mystery of Le Fanu, the story also packs some welcome sophistication.

Sumptuous pages, generously oversized in the European album format, not only showcase Bonhomme’s art in all its expressive favour but also creates a nostalgia-boost as it links back to Tintin, Asterix and Lucky Luke, the oversize paperback books that were so important to me personally as a kid. Bonhomme’s beautiful cartooning resembles something like Tonci Zonjic and Goran Sudzuka teaming up on an expansive period piece, and proves to be as lovely as that idea sounds. His characters are distinctive, expressive and beautifully realised and the sinister microcosm of Brac feels expansive and real and from Brac’s knobbly brickwork to its skeletal trees, to its menacing waves, his work is absolutely superb. Brac’s woods are given a fittingly spooky atmosphere, especially during a particularly taut chase sequence. The fear on Poulain’s face is apparent as he faces death on multiple occasions as is the despair he feels as he fears the malevolent Isle is claiming his very sanity. Baron Gwenole in particular looks both cuddly and menacingly burly, his face moving from the peaceful to the glowering from panel to panel.

When we next catch up with Poulain in “The Black Virgin,” he’s accepted his role as a kind of ghost detective/debunker, travelling from place to place to solve crimes of potentially supernatural origin.For the past two years, at Christmas, women have been horribly murdered near the Shrine of The Black Virgin in rural Puy Marie. The shrine is of special significance to local gypsies, so of course suspicions are cast their way and in particular toward a lovely fortune teller. Poulain, struggling to ingratiate himself with the locals, is not wanted by either the travelling gypsies or the townsfolk. The superstitions of both sides swell and when another body is found, Poulain begins to doubt his ability to uncover the murderer.

The wonderful thing about the Anaon books is just how bumbling Poulain actually is as out slightly mystical, know it all crime solver. Even here, having realised some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy by owning the “role” of The Marquis of Anaon, he’s still far from becoming a brave and heroic crusader. He screams when he’s frightened, vomits when he finds a mutilated chicken placed in his bed as warning, can’t keep his pistol from quivering when pointed at a potential threat. Getting by on an aura of near mysticism that’s completely self-created, Poulain is in many ways as much of a fraud as the charlatans he encounters as he digs deeper into the mystery. However, all of these foibles actually make Poulain a far more human character and in many ways even more relatable. His intent is good and just, his open-mindedness in an era of bible-thumping and belief in curses is commendable, his bumbling attempts at bravery made somehow even braver by the fact that he can’t fight and scares easily. He pushes ever onward with minimal help, into grave dangers he’s in no way ready to handle.

Bonhomme’s art remains gorgeous. His bleak woods of winter-dead trees, his snowfalls, his gypsy camps and frosted stonework are impeccable and atmospheric. Fond of framing longshots with spindly branches and Mignola-esque trees in the foreground as characters meet in the mid-ground, his staging is perfect, his layouts direct. Vehlmann’s script is brisk, yet punctuated by entire pages of quiet moments, allowing his artist to shine and his characters a moment to breathe.

Both of these books are beautiful comics packages. Cinebook touts itself as “The 9th Art Publisher” and with product as cinematic, compelling and visually lovely as The Marquis of Anaon series, they’re backing up the boast.


CRIMINAL: THE SPECIAL EDITION 
By Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips 
Published By Image 

Here’s a thing you might not know: Sean Phillips needs pages from Ed Brubaker every week. Necessity being the mother of invention and all that, I suspect Brubaker enjoys having to punch out script for his artist at the rate of an old, classic, paid-by-the-word pulp writer; it seems to fit his aesthetic. The publishing deal that the team has with Image – essentially to publish anything it dreams up, no questions asked – makes everything viable, including a magazine-sized special edition of their series Criminal featuring spliced-in pages of “Sword of the Savage,” a tribute sword and sorcery number that shares inspirational DNA with old Savage Sword of Conan periodicals.

It’s 1976.Criminal fave Teeg Lawless is in the slammer on a two-week stretch for no-showing a traffic court hearing. It’s a typical bad choice creates bad luck scenario for Teeg, who just wants to be left alone in his cell to read old Sword of the Savage tales, but unfortunately there’s a price on his head and a whole stack of jailbirds intending to collect.

Sword of the Savage features the character of Zangar, whose situation mirrors Teeg’s beautifully – stuck in an inhospitable crystalline desert, surrounded by enemies struggling for survival. Phillips beautifully shifts between the “realism” of Teeg’s comics world (lovingly coloured by Elizabeth Breitweiser) and the black and white, inkier, looser style of Zangar in which bits of Buscema and Toth can be picked out amongst the traditional Phillips style.

Brubaker’s clearly having a blast here, mocking the gender politics of old, hyper-masculine Sword and Sorcery stuff in the Zangar pages and peppering his jailbird dialogue with tonnes of rapid-fire gags. The oversized, magazine formatted edition also comes with a hilarious letters page from “Zangar fans” like Kurt Busiek and Chip Zdarsky answered by Brubaker in the sober editorial tone that so often typified published responses to bizarre missives of this type. If you didn’t get this edition, you missed half the fun. It’s no Eternaut or Complete Eightball in presentation, but man, it succeeds in mimicking the old school magazine format exceptionally.

This return to a much beloved series is near-perfect. My only real complaint is a total nit-pick – the lack of hand lettering on Zangar’s pages – and with another of these specials just announced (too late for my 2016 picks last week!) and forthcoming, this time a Kung Fu-themed special, it seems that again this year Brubaker and Phillips will get to have their cake and eat it once more. Good luck topping this one-shot, guys, but I sure do look forward to the attempt.




INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND WORLD WAR 

By Shintaro Kago 
Published By U.D.W.F.G 

(Review taken and edited from All Star Recommends October 6th

This handsome, oversized black and white hardcover, published by U.D.W.F.G (Under Dark Weird Fantasy Grounds), is one of the comics crown jewels of my trip to Japan. Featuring a wonderful introduction by James Harvey (Masterplasty), which beautifully contextualises Shintaro Kago’s work for the possibly confused or off put and laments the lack of Kago’s work available in English, Industrial Revolution and World War is otherwise completely silent, requiring no knowledge of either Japanese or English, only a love of strange, compelling and utterly unique comics.

A race of intelligent tiny marsupials, who explore their world by riding ducklings like Tauntauns, discover the numerous bodies of naked young women entombed in a mountain. Freeing them, our cuddly little guys make the most of their discovery by assembling construction equipment from the corpses. Multi-armed earthmovers and cranes enable them to rapidly overhaul their society. Towers are built, freeways erected. Life quickly becomes an industrialised utopia, but when they are invaded by their neighbours, who have transformed the bodies of young naked men into weapons of war, they are forced to abandon their consumerist paradise and remodel their equipment into even fiercer fighting equipment than their foes. Their enemies upgrade their weapons again, escalating things further and world war erupts. It’s utterly bonkers. I can’t speak highly enough about it.



SEXCOVEN (FRONTIER #7) 
By Jillian Tamaki 
Published By Youth in Decline 

2015 was a big year for Jillian Tamaki, with her highly regarded webcomic, Super Mutant Teenage Academy being collected into print and winning an “Outstanding Story” Ignatz for her stand-alone story, “SexCoven” from Frontier #7.

Uploaded mysteriously to the internet in 1996, a “six-hour atonal drone” is downloaded by a teenager. Naming the noise “SexCoven,” the song quickly spreads as it’s copied, shared and listened to by kids everywhere. “Listeners report cascading feelings of dread, fear, love and euphoria,” we are told with transcendental out-of-body experiences and a sense of universal harmony enveloping all who hear it. The song quickly becomes something of a rite of passage, with kids driving out into the woods to listen to it, sparking a trend of “coven crawls” across America, with rules drawn up by teens for teens that travel outdoors to listen to the music in groups.

Tamaki tells her story dryly, observationally, using quotes from magazine articles, interviews and “web clips” to stitch her narrative together. Her layouts are experimental, her art is open and clean. I’ve before described Frontier as the indie Solo, a comic in which those chosen to contribute can stretch themselves artistically and formalistically. Even as Tamaki’s work continues to evolve and develop (witness her illustrations for The Folio Society),“SexCoven” will no doubt be looked back upon and regarded as a high point in her body of work.



TWO BROTHERS 
By Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba (based on the novel by Milton Hatoum) 
Published By Dark Horse 

The best extended family drama in comics since Gilbert Hernandez picked up a pencil, Two Brothers is the wrenching story of estranged twins, Yaqub and Omar, expertly told by the comics medium’s favourite twins, Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba.

Based on the celebrated novel by Milton Hatoum (unread by yours truly), Two Brothers is an expertly handled adaptation, lyrical in both its language and visuals. The strange, sad conflict between Yaqub, the withdrawn, studious brother ever at odds with Omar, the extroverted troublemaker, expelled from school for punching a teacher, forms the meat of this tale which unfolds with Literary grace, but there is much more to this family history than merely these two feuding brothers. The relationship between their parents, Zana and Halim, is explored in great detail, their personal histories, their courtship, the birth of their children (including daughter, Rania). Housekeeper Domingas also forms an important part of the unfurling plot and, accentuated by a fully-realised portrait of a surprisingly diverse pre and post-war Brazil, everyone included is fully developed, breathing whole and complete on the page in their various passions and miseries and heartbreaks.

But poor Yaqub, ever seeking a peaceful existence in which he doesn’t have to look into the distorted mirror that is his brother. “Get out of Manaus,” he is even told at one point, “If you stay here, you’ll be ruined by the provinces and eaten alive by your brother.” Escape the town of Manaus Yaqub does, but remains a ghostly presence in the lives of the family, ironically more present that Omar who does little more than lie on the hammock, drink and carouse. Yet Omar is not a character who lacks all sympathy and, as his relationship with his parents disintegrates with almost every turn of the page, the real complexity of these familial relations begins to reveal itself.

Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay the comic is how honest and real it all feels, with Moon and Ba’s energetic and highly-stylised lines carrying everything forward with an effortless cinematic feel. Brian Michael Bendis is quoted on the back cover, saying, “This book jumps onto the list of the most essential graphic novels you will ever read...” I feared he’d jinxed Two Brothers with that, created an expectation of something ready to be slipped into the canon even as it arrived on store shelves. He’s not wrong though, he’s really not. Two Brothers is a worthy addition to your shelf of the very best.



And there we go. Phew. Whatta year. 


See you next week. 
Love your comics.


Cameron Ashley spends a lot of time writing comics and other things you’ll likely never read. He’s the chief editor and co-publisher of Crime Factory (www.thecrimefactory.com). You can reach him @cjamesashley on Twitter.