There was a lot of pressure on this collection, seeing as how Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve and Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s New X-Men were solely responsible for getting me to read comics again after a half decade hiatus. This deluxe edition from Drawn & Quarterly is a remarkable piece of packaging, too, as it … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #30: ’32 Stories’
There is so much realism being pumped into mainstream comics artwork these days to get books to look like action movies that this book felt like a summer trip to the swimming pool. There are so many great creators and points I want to hit in an overview of what’s going on here, I’ll have … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #29: ‘Strange Tales’ #1
To be fair, I had every expectation going into this new launch that it was going to be an ultra-violent action story made to somehow be a vehicle for an anti-hero who’s nowhere near as geeky as Peter Parker but manages to become attached to something exactly like Spider-Man’s symbiote costume and then end up … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #28: ‘Haunt’ #1
Well, the shell game with the Red Hood’s identity finally concluded in rather lackluster fashion in this issue, which gets the lowest marks from yet. I didn’t think Philip Tan’s artwork was nearly as detrimental to the story as Brian Cronin did, but I did feel like the payoff in the story itself was underneath … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #27: ‘Batman & Robin’ #5
Oh boy. So you know all of that pulpy action and B-movie-style genre action Ed Brubaker got the entire Iron Fist institution to imbibe over at Marvel over the last few years? I’m happy to say that seems to have flooded out of the pages of Iron Fist and into this mini-anthology of Shang-Chi stories, … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #26: ‘Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu One-Shot’
First of all, how crazy is it that the last Green Lantern #46 had Mongul in it as well during “Reign of the Supermen!”? Funny how that stuff happens. I was wondering when the story was going to get back to Mongul, now that he’d fashioned those gigantic pieces of hate bling for himself from … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #25: ‘Green Lantern’ #46
Hans Rickheit has always been an enigmatic authorial figure for me — I fittingly discovered him at MoCCA a few years ago while he was absent from his table, but whoever was manning it facilitated the sale of a couple volumes of his Chrome Fetus minicomics to me. His new graphic novel from Fantagraphics is … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #24: ‘The Squirrel Machine’
This is the kind of opening sequence I read B.P.R.D. books for. I mentioned in my Bayou review that Gabriel Bá does some of the most playfully terrifying work in these books that I’ve ever scene, and B.P.R.D.: 1947 #3 is a perfect example of those skills at work. One of the really successful visual … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #23: ‘B.P.R.D.: 1947’ #3
Here’s a story I began reading more than a year ago and was initially fond of, but as is often the case with ZudaComics.com and my consistently under-performing home Internet speed thanks to AT&T, convenience drove me away until my pal Rickey Purdin dropped me a hard copy. I really love a lot of the … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #22: ‘Bayou’ Vol. 1
“Are all black holes this condescending?” –Negative Man By the time I picked up the second issue of Keith Giffen and Matthew Clark’s Doom Patrol at the shop, issue #1 was sold out, and I haven’t managed to locate one quite yet. This was obviously a little frustrating, but a few factors warmed me up … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #21: ‘Doom Patrol’ #2